Food Freedom: the Ultimate Act of Self Care for Black Women

Have you been struggling with weight for years, trying one restrictive eating plan after another, sometimes losing weight, sometimes not, but always regaining it back? Do you sometimes feel confused about what you actually should eat because you’ve heard so much conflicting advice? You are not alone. For many people eating no longer brings any joy. Sadly, food has been reduced to just calories, macros and nutrients to be counted, rationed and stressed over. 

But as we learn more and more about how stress kills and how to take better care of ourselves with relaxation and recreation, the landscape of food and diet has only become more and more toxic. Diet culture is so pervasive that it has basically taken over every aspect of our lives. 

This is why food freedom is more important than ever right now.

What Exactly is Food Freedom?

Food freedom is being free to intentionally and mindfully eat what you want, when you 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 you never have to eat so-called healthy food that you don’t enjoy. You can eat what you want, when you want, and how much you want without going completely crazy with food. It’s going through life without constant thoughts of weight and weight loss 24/7.

Food freedom is when your relationship with food is relaxed and effortless and involves respect and pleasure instead of anxiety, fear and guilt. When you achieve food freedom you can go to dinner with friends, enjoy a party, or an evening dining in without the drama that goes on in your mind around weight or morality, and just enjoy your time. Small children and people in other parts of the world not as consumed in diet culture enjoy just eating without all the extra emotional baggage putting a damper on the occasion.

It is important to have a good relationship with food mainly because the stress that comes with all of the food restriction, guilt, shame, and confusion is what really takes a huge toll on your health and happiness. And happiness is an essential component of good health. It relieves stress, which is at the root of most chronic diseases, much more so than eating food that’s considered to be “unhealthy”.

Food freedom is when deciding what to eat, when to eat, and preparing food according to food rules is no longer a whole full time job. Your mind is freed up to focus on other more interesting and meaningful interests, hobbies, or important causes than maintaining an unsustainable diet to force your body to shrink.

At some point, we realize that diets are inherently unsustainable. Restricting calories, macros or food groups becomes difficult in the long term because the more you restrict, the more you obsess about food. It may be possible to hang on for a while, for some, maybe even a pretty long while but eventually your body will win. The restriction makes you almost crazy and creates a situation where bingeing is nearly irresistible. This is not due to lack of willpower or weakness, it’s biology. Your body will rebel against your food restriction, and that’s exactly what it is supposed to do, even though it will bring disappointment. So even if you can manage to lose some weight by restricting calories, the result is largely temporary. Food freedom finally breaks the vicious cycle of restricting food, craving, bingeing, frustration, guilt and shame, and back to restricting again.

The Ultimate Self Care

“Self-care includes everything related to staying physically healthy — including hygiene, nutrition, and seeking medical care when needed. It’s all the steps an individual can take to manage stressors in his or her life and take care of his or her own health and well-being.” ~Everyday Health Self Care

Since you have to eat every day to live, shouldn’t this be something that is satisfying on more than a rudimentary, clinical level? Food and eating have a much higher purpose than just being food for your limbs. Food is love. It is an essential part of culture, and has traditions and history that should be honored. Food brings people together in ways that nothing else does, and always has. If you ignore all the other important roles that food serves, then you are not fully nourishing your mind, body or spirit.

I know people who spend loads of time and money in pursuit of self care, but then choke down nasty green drinks and lettuce wraps, all believing that they are doing something good for their bodies. But in fact they are sad and unsatisfied and convince themselves or allow gurus to convince them that they are “cleansing” or “detoxing” from some ubiquitous impurities. Even if they physically feel terrible, they are doing this in the name of health.

Self care is not supposed to stress you out. It’s definitely not supposed to make you feel like you have the flu, all in the name of supposedly “purging some toxins”. It’s also not supposed to make you feel sad. But following external cues and rules about food is inherently stress inducing, which is also devastating to your health and happiness.

Escape from Diet Culture

Food freedom is  a permanent escape from diet culture and its racist, sexist history. Diet culture is a whole lifestyle and belief system built around weight loss and glorifying being or trying to be thin over all else. Diet culture is all around us, every single day. Sometimes it’s easy to spot and other times we may not recognize it. Diet culture dictates that we have to be thin to be beautiful, happy, and healthy, none of which is anywhere near true. Of course this also means that if you’re fat you’re ugly, miserable and unhealthy, which is just absurd.

Diet culture has existed for centuries in some way, shape or form but really began to take hold when religious zealot Sylvester Graham (the creator of the graham cracker) sought to tame the sexual appetites of Americans. He believed and taught that gluttony, lust, and materialism were making people physically ill. So, he constructed a completely and literally bland diet of fruits, vegetables and whole grains, no meat, spices or alcohol. Even black pepper was prohibited. The puritanical Graham diet attracted a cult of followers seeking to be pure and moral. 

In the middle of the 18th century racist whites were on the hunt for pseudo science to support their claims of superiority over black and brown people. According to Sabrina Strings, author of “Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia”:

“inferior races have no self-control … because of how interested they are in sex and food. This was really the beginning of linking what was considered an unruly type of fatness to Blackness.”

These attitudes have carried over up to today, in the wellness world, which is dominated by skinny white women. Do a search for “wellness” and you will find any number of the thinnest, palest women eating salad or drinking green smoothies and laughing. Or she’s doing a yoga pose or skipping through the market with a basket full of fresh veggies. Why is this a problem? Because after so much bombardment of the same images the implication is that there is no other way to be healthy or experience wellness. Diet culture enforces the idea that anything outside of the typical cliche imagery of whiteness is simply not valid.

Most approaches to wellness ignore or criticize cultures and cuisines that don’t fit the banal, whitewashed rendition of wellness that the diet industry presents to the world. They go through great lengths to convince the world that African, Caribbean and Latin American cuisines are inferior to their contrived, unseasoned, flavorless yet colorful melange of vegetables and fruits. The message is that you can’t possibly be healthy and also honor rich ethnic food traditions. And you have to do yoga. And you need to be able to afford expensive luxury spa treatments. And exercise, exercise, exercise!

Promoting one standard of beauty over all others isn’t a thing by accident. It’s very intentional in its othering of everything that is not thin and white. There is an artificial hierarchy of acceptable bodies and there’s no surprise, black women are at the very bottom.

What Food Freedom Isn’t 

Food freedom is not just a free-for-all nonstop binge session ending in you living a 600-lb life. For some people it’s very scary to start trusting themselves around food to be able to eat in a way to sustain good health long term. We have been conditioned to believe that we must have some outside influence to tell us what, when and how much to eat. But that’s a damn lie. 

Recently the concept of food freedom has been co opted and hijacked by diet culture to trick people into buying products that are actually, in fact, diet culture. There is one particular diet company that in one one tells you about all the things you must avoid eating and then turns right around and paints a picture that when you are able to slowly reintroduce restricted foods and food groups, this is called food freedom!? GTFOH. It’s like arresting some freedom fighters and then letting them out of jail and telling them “you’re free!” while they have no more freedom than when they started.

How Food Freedom Leads to a More Delicious Lifestyle

Food freedom is not just freedom to eat the way you want, it’s whole life freedom! When you no longer have to watch what you eat or build your whole life around food rules. You can go to events and celebrations without stressing out about what is going to be available to eat, not having to comb the internet for bland, unseasoned diet food and then pretending like it tastes good.

Instead, you can visit with family and friends and eat your favorite traditional dishes, fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, tamales, red rice, collard greens, 

Imagine if you didn’t constantly think about what size your pants are or  what the number is on the scale to base your whole mood around how you think you should be doing each day, 

So How do you Achieve Food Freedom?

For once, being healthy and happy does not involve food rules and restrictions. You don’t need people telling you what to eat and what not to eat. Food freedom is more of a mindset issue. Learning to trust your body’s signals about hunger, fullness and food craving is key. We have been taught to ignore our hunger, eat foods we hate, and go on an emotional rollercoaster as a result of every bite you take. We have to basically de-program ourselves and get back to the basics of eating what we want without being told by some external sources.

Intention is one of the most important parts of food freedom. Each person needs to be able to make informed decisions about what we want to nourish our bodies, minds and spirits without outside influence. Intention allows us to create a framework for what tastes good and what makes us feel good in both the short and long term. Use caution though, not to confuse intention with creating diet-y conditions that put you all the way back to square one, worrying and stressing about food.

Why Attaining Food Freedom isn’t Easy

You can’t just flip a switch and be done with diet culture, because it’s almost inescapable. It’s literally everywhere you turn, and when you think it’s not, it really is, just coded. You will need to deprogram yourself and make conscious decisions every minute of every day not to get sucked back into the weight loss fray.

Learning to trust yourself when you’ve been taught from birth the exact opposite will be a major challenge. Early on, when children actually know when they’re hungry and when they’re full and act accordingly, adults step in and start micromanaging things. Sometimes for practical reasons, like eating when food is available. But it goes so far as to completely obscure any sense of autonomy when it comes to when, what and how much to eat. Vegetables are unintentionally villainized for life and snack food rationing creates the obsession with it that lasts for decades.

There are lots of moving parts in the process of returning to that place of confidence and trust of yourself with food. These things need to be learned and mastered like any other discipline:

• Mindfulness – paying attention without judgment; savoring food
• Intention – making conscious decisions about how you want to eat and live
• Intuitive eating – recognizing and acting on your body’s natural signals as to what foods are good for you, how much and when
• Body respect – not hating, resenting or battling with your body to force into a different size or shape
• Healthy thinking – de-coupling health from size; disassociating exercise with weight loss and honoring happiness and joy

What you Can Do

You can do the research and do your own trial and error like I did, but that can take years, or even decades. There is no one single source for all of the different topics involved in the overall goal of food freedom, and most of it out there does not take into consideration our rich black food cultures and traditions and demonize everything that is dear to us (surprised?).

If you don’t feel like you want to do all of that you can hire me as your coach to help you to design your healthy lifestyle around food and focus on your unique circumstances, rather than a one-size fits all approach. We would spend more time on the areas you need and not waste time on areas you don’t. We would work together while maintaining an uplifting, empowering framework and attitude, rather than your typical cold, clinical and boring way of doing things when it comes to health.

If this sounds like something that would help you change your life for the better, schedule a chat with me to find out more information. It’s free and you’re not obligated to join any programs.