The beginning

For most of my life, I’ve had a strange relationship with food. First of all, I’ve never really enjoyed eating. Eating has often been more of a nuisance to me than an enjoyment. Much of the time it felt like a waste of time, or at the very least, an incredibly inconvenient way to spend my time. For years I’ve eaten only to survive and tried to spend as little time thinking about what to eat as humanly possible, and even less time preparing it. 

I loathed that I had to stop whatever I was doing to eat, so often I just ate as I was moving around or I would snack throughout the day. I’m told that I dance when I eat, which I believe comes from the fact that I find it uncomfortable to sit down to eat, and I do not excel at standing still. The need to eat has long been a bit infuriating, I still struggle with it occasionally when I’m stressed. But overall I know that I need to eat, that it’s not an option to forgo nurturance, so I’ve dedicated my last 10 years to figuring out how to do it. Now, I would say I’m getting quite good at eating, and I’ve even begun to find pleasure in food in the last few years.

With that in mind, I want to talk about what eating looked like for most of my life. Since I was very young, I’ve been labelled a pretty picky eater, in the sense that I have issues with textures [mushy, slimy, sticky, etc.] and flavour combinations. I prefer simple, whole foods, and always have. 

In my teenage years I developed a coping mechanism of over eating sugary food-like-substances in order to ward off an impending hypoglycemic crash from forgetting to eat, or not being able to eat due to stress, or anxiety, or simply lack of financial means. When I hit my sugar threshold and could tolerate it no more I would know I needed real food, and from there my “pickiness” came in the form of only wanting to eat whole, fresh foods. I became a master of ‘bachelor breakfasts’ as my mom calls them, which is where I put nearly every odd bit of a leftover I can find in a pan with heaps of butter & bacon & eggs and call it good. 

I’ve always favored fresh fruits, vegetables, and beefy cuts of unprocessed meats or chunks of cheese to sustain me over bread, grains, pastas, or pastries of any kind. In fact, grains and things made from them have never appealed to me much, something that I have been mockingly despised for [hopefully in jest] for nearly as long as I can remember. Blueberry muffins are an exception, though only with fresh blueberries and real flour. Traditional homemade alfajores, and gooey cinnamon rolls would be my other carb-y treats of choice. Other people always found me strange for my preferences in most things but especially, I feel, in dietary choices. Regardless of the feelings of others, my deep preferences have changed very little over the years— but originally, I didn’t have any basis for it other than it’s what I wanted, so back off.  

I’ve also always been a naturally petite human, so my caloric needs are quite low, and I like to keep them that way for convenience. This doesn’t mean I can’t eat massive quantities of food when I need to, like on a rock climbing trip where I’m expending much more energy than ‘normal.’ What it meant in highschool was bouncing between surviving off of a two liter of Dr. Pepper and a box of cookie crisp for an entire day— which was the only time in my life I’ve ever drunk soda and I didn’t like it much; I just felt like I needed the sugar and calories— or eating a 1 pound California burrito in one sitting, but ripping off as much of the tortilla as I could because I didn’t like it.

Needless to say, this diet didn’t do wonders for my health. And being the tiny, fragile human that I’ve always been—I weighed in 70-ish pounds through much of high school— I’ve never had much wiggle room for poor choices in health. I believe the only reason this subsisting off of a sugar diet ever even ‘worked’ for me was strictly due to my youth, and the vigor that often accompanies it. Though, I was sick with cold, flu, digestion issues, and allergies for most of my young life, so I guess it depends on your definition of ‘working.’ 

The Middle

All of this to say, I had a big, sloppy, slew of reasons to begin researching nutrition, and how our food choices affect our bodies and our brains. 

Another thing you should understand about me, is that I’m an autodidact, a researcher, and an analyst at heart. Once I developed the interest out of necessity of my own health issues and concerns, and lack of financial means to hire out, it was a rather natural trajectory into complete obsession for me. 

My original goals were, yes, to heal my body, but also to learn how to power-pack my meals to nourish me as much as possible with every bite, because my bites were limited, whether due to space [small person=small stomach], interest, or perceived time. With that goal in mind I dove in and began learning how to truly nourish my body apart from any damaging label, or bogus pseudoscience. I’ve spent thousands of hours researching health, reading studies, summarizing them, reading books, listening to podcasts, and lectures on nutrition, checking and cross-checking each study with any others, and of course, carrying out my own experiments on myself. 

It was all such a natural progression and genuine interest, that’s it’s difficult to say when exactly it began. But I can tell you with great enthusiasm that it’s in full fledge and I’m feeling that pull to begin sharing this wealth of knowledge that I’ve accumulated. Of course, I don’t want you to just take my word for it, because I am a hearty supporter of free-thinking individuals, and I believe that you are all extremely capable of making your own dietary choices. 

However, I also know that people enjoy guidance, and at this point in my life I am a well-spring of knowledge. Which is why I now coach people on how eat, how to engage with the natural world, and how to heal themselves, and their relationships to food. I would be happy to be a source of guidance for you, or a loved one. 

In my whirlwind of self-guided studies, experiments, curiosities and listening to my own body, the biggest thing I’ve discovered is that true nourishment is simple. 

It doesn’t come with a daunting or ego-driven label. It’s not gluten free, grain free, fat free, nut free, sugar free, Paleo, Whole-30, Ketogenic, Atkins, or even raw carnivore… etc. etc. It’s food. It’s real food from whole sources, prepared, grown, and raised properly with humanity, ethics, compassion, and heart. 

It’s about judgement free listening to your body, and giving it what it wants in the purest form you can manage. It’s taking life and diet one step at a time, and learning to prioritize mental, emotional, spiritual, physical, and psychological nourishment. Which brings me to the second biggest component of true nutrition and nourishment.

You simply cannot attain physical well being without mental, emotional, spiritual, and psychological nourishment. All of these aspects of us are inextricably linked and tied to one another, each one to the next and every one in between. 

If you are not nourishing yourself emotionally, allowing your emotions to move through your mind and body at their own pace as you carefully and gently give yourself time to process them, then you won’t be able to have psychological peace, and mentally you will feel a huge drain, possibly presenting as brain fog or mental fatigue. 

And whether you call it spirituality, or your bigger beliefs about where you came from and how you got here, it’s psychologically crucial to have a worldview. No, it doesn’t actually matter where your worldview comes from, whether you adhere to a religion or evolution, or simply a doctrine of kindness, you absolutely must know what you believe in order to maintain hope. This is a studied psychological fact. And this will be a significant determination in whether or not you feel mentally capable of facing your life or how long you have hope for the future, or how, or if you see a future.

Beyond that, your worldview, your beliefs determine so much of your life. To the point where I would venture to say many people don’t have a problem with food, they have a problem with their beliefs around food, and with their mindsets around why they’re eating. Are you eating to nourish yourself? To lose weight? To be “healthy”? To get strong? What does “healthy” mean to you? Is food a matter of morality or nourishment? Do you see what I mean? There are many ways to get it twisted, many people creating rules and systems, and most of them are still getting it wrong.

Because without these mental balances in place or at least being worked on, your physical health will suffer. The effects of stress, anxiety, and depression on digestion and physical health have been well studied, and they are not good.

I don’t say this to discourage you, I say this to inspire you. If you are having trouble nourishing your body physically, maybe it’s not the food your eating, but the way you’re eating it. Maybe you’re having a more pressing issue in a different, but intensely linked area of your health that is holding you back from true nourishment. 

This may sound overwhelming, but once you begin it’s the most natural thing in the world to recognize the ties, the correlations, the parallels, and to shift your experience into strengthening each area of health through working on yourself as a whole organism, rather than trying to separate us complex beings into these neat, safe little categories. We are human. We are multi-faceted, so of course our nourishment is, also.

Omnivores eat everything. Humans are omnivores, we’re adaptable.

The next chapter

I’ve been coaching for a few years, specifically in diet, emotional awareness, and stress reduction practices, and have been fortunate enough to help a good number of people through an array of health issues in a natural way without the use of medication. Instead I guide people on how to use food as medicine, as was always intended. I believe in developing individualized plans specifically suited to each persons current needs, taking small steps to true change based on your needs. I believe food should always be our first line of defense and medication should only be introduced in dire circumstances for brief periods always with the goal of equilibrium through mind, body, emotional, psychological and spiritual health. 

Nutrition is where I choose to begin with most people, but not without incorporating beneficial aspects of somatics, trauma work, stress management and intentional learning. I’m not interested in telling my clients what to do. I’m not interested in being another voice in the matrix pushing supplements, and “purified nutrients” [nothing pure about it] on the masses. I’m a firm believer that in today’s toxin laden world the only way to find true healing is to get back to our true natures. Fortunately there are thousands of paths on the way to rediscovering our connection to the natural world we come from.

For myself, I have healed, and will continue to heal many things that I was led to believe would be lifetime struggles. I rarely take supplements, because I choose to nourish myself through my diet, as god intended. I hold space for myself and others to work through trauma every day. I am focused on bringing truth back into the world, back up to the forefront. I do this work because I believe we are all sovereign beings, I believe that we are meant to be in charge of our own lives, to explore the world, and to do what feels right in our bodies.

I long to teach people how to reconnect to themselves, how to read themselves, how to understand the bigger picture of what their needs are. I hope to be able to break down the fears that many of us hold around food, diet and exercise, through education, and direct experiencing of a life that was tailored to being a human. I want people to understand how simple, and anarchistic it is to take care of yourself in today’s world, and how much a difference it brings to your life.

If you would like help on your individual journey and believe I may be a good resource for you please reach out through my contact page and tell me about your goals, issues, concerns, or desires in regards to simple nourishment. My goal is to listen to truly hear what your needs are, to teach you how to hear what I hear when you speak, to give you tools to understand your body and mind, to erase the fear that mainstream education instills in us, to address those fears in a supportable, lasting fashion. 

If that’s not what you need and you prefer to do it alone or with your own support system, great! Please feel free to follow along and use this site as a resource on your journey. I will be updating it with resources, recipes, and current research on dietary choices. Thanks so much for reading. Happy Healing!