Laura Thomas - Just Eat It: How intuitive eating can help you get your shit together around food

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

W hat do you want to eat? Close your eyes for a second and just let that question sit with you. What did you pick out? Is it something that you usually eat? Is it something you have rules around? Is it something on your food shit list? You know that place that all bad foods get relegated to, apart from at Christmas time when youre in full fuck-it mode and they get a free pass but go straight back in the Things I Dont Eat category on 1 January.

When was the last time you even asked yourself what youd like instead of what you can or should eat?

I work with people like this, every day. People who spend 90% of their day worrying about what to eat. People who have spent an egregious amount of time thinking about if their fruit salad was too high in sugar, or anxious about whether Paleo or plant-based is better. People who conceive elaborate rules about what, when, and how much to eat. People who need a PhD in maths to figure out how much they have to work out in order to earn a cookie based on what theyve already eaten that day, and how much carbs and protein are in their other meals. People who have dedicated enormous amounts of time, money, energy and other precious resources to solving the problem of what to eat. People who are fearful and anxious about feeding their bodies. People who dont know how to understand and interpret their hunger and fullness cues and dont trust themselves around food. People who hate their bodies with the fire of a thousand suns. People who punish their bodies with extreme exercise and deploy elaborate systems of hunger avoidance (Diet Coke, anyone?). People who feel guilty for feeding their bodies. An essential and fundamental requirement for living has become so fraught and stressful that we delegate the responsibility to an app on our phones. WE TRUST OUR PHONES MORE THAN WE TRUST OUR BODIES.

This shit is exhausting.

I know because I have been this person. Despite having a PhD in nutritional sciences, I have experienced being in a weird, strained, and troubled relationship with food: calorie-tracking, juice-cleanses, gluten-free-plant-based-no-oil-whole-foods-eighty-ten-ten. Check. Check. And check. I even went through a raw vegan phase (I shit you not). Compulsive exercise, only allowing myself to eat half a plate of food, or chewing gum and downing glasses of water to silence hunger you name it, Ive been there. In fact, Id go so far as to say, the more I learned about nutrition, the weirder it got.

I have two degrees in nutrition. Ive done research at an Ivy League university. I read scientific journals for fun. But I still had a really messed-up relationship with food.

Im not telling you this for sympathy or pity, or because Ive come out the other end and have all the secrets and answers; Im telling you so that you know Ive been there too. I get it. Im laying all my shit out on the table, because at no point in this book do I ever want anyone to feel shamed or judged; so many of us have problems with food, but rarely do we talk about it.

Having an education in nutritional sciences doesnt immunize you against being weird around food. In fact, often the more you know, the worse you get. Studies have shown than nutritionists and dietitians have the highest incidence of orthorexia and rigid eating. I mean, no shit, right? More on that in a second, lets get back to my sob story first.

Having had a pretty turbulent childhood divorce and moving and more divorce and new schools food was a constant in my life. Its no wonder that I became a chubby kid. Food was comfort, food was soothing.

But because kids are dicks I soon got nicknames like Thunder Thighs, and was subject to constant, relentless, teasing at school, especially from boys. This just made me sadder, and hungrier, and I used food to deal with difficult emotions. One summer, when I was around thirteen or fourteen, I went to Summer Camp in America. I loved it. I made friends, got a tan, played, swam, and did fun kid stuff. When I went back to school that fall, it felt like the whole school was talking about my summer at fat camp. It wasnt a fat camp, I was drinking real Coke and eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches all summer. But I was also more active than usual and actually had fun playing games and dancing, and doing kid shit away from the school bullies. It was also 40C and we walked for miles a day back and forth to the Fillin Station (seriously) on the other side of camp. I inevitably lost a few pounds, but, unsurprisingly, put it straight back on when I got home.

Layer on well-meaning but painful comments from parents and family (cant you just have a piece of fruit or some chewing gum?, your skirt is riding up at the back, youre too big for it, its just puppy fat, shell grow out of it) plus dieting talk all around me, messages that fat was bad, and a tall, athletic brother, and what do you get? A recipe for food fucked-upness.

At around sixteen I started restricting what I ate, and intentionally got very active. I lost a lot of weight. My new thinness was congratulated and reinforced. Boys were suddenly interested (the same ones who had called me Thunder Thighs).

This carried on through university, but my eating got weirder. I started reading books on nutrition; not academic texts, which would have been great, but fear-mongering, spirulina-peddling-type books. I told you I was laying out all my shit. Now, instead of just limiting how much I ate, I started cutting out more and more food groups until I was left with a salad and some tofu. This coincidentally was around the time I decided to go vegan, which was largely due to ethical reasons, but I also got it in my head that milk caused breast cancer (it doesnt), so then there This restriction would almost inevitably lead to me sneaking out to get a Dairy Milk hit like a chocolate junkie. As well learn, deprivation often leads to bingeing. Fortunately, I snapped out of that phase pretty quickly; tofu salads dont have anything on cold pizza on a drunken walk home with friends after a night out.

But when shit hit the fan in my final year of uni, I gained a lot of weight. Stress eating was my thing. A few months later I moved to the US to do my PhD and this, combined with not walking anywhere and comfort eating (in Texas, anyone from not-Texas is super foreign and it took a while to make friends), meant I was the biggest Id ever been and I hated myself deeply.

The binge/restrict cycle went on all through my PhD (remember I was studying nutrition, what the hell was I thinking?). Break-ups? Didnt eat. PhD exam stress? Ate too much. New cities and new jobs meant fluctuations in my weight. I hated my body, I hated tracking everything I was eating only to ultimately faceplant into a jar of peanut butter at night. Remember, this is all confounded by being around nutrition and dietetics students who on the surface of things have it all figured out, but many of whom were also struggling. Calorie-counting, portion control, food rules and a vendetta on bad carbs are not only normal, thats literally what were taught and many of us dutifully played the part. Underneath it all though, the struggle was so real.

Good thing then that I came across the concepts of Intuitive Eating, and the anti-diet movement. At first I was sceptical but after doing some research I was like holy shit, this is genius. I started reading blogs, books, and published research, and over time I began to chill. I started eating what I wanted, when I was hungry (wow, eating when youre hungry; revolutionary, but youd be surprised at how many people straight up ignore it), I exercised because it felt good, not because I needed to burn off my food. I stopped seeing food as a problem. My weight stabilized. OK, I wasnt a size 8, but after years of restriction and over-eating, and beating myself up, this felt good. I didnt have to micro-manage what I was eating, and it gave me the time and energy to do more interesting and important things.