A reflection on intergenerational hunger, healing, and the body as home.

I was born in 1985 and grew up in a small North Queensland town. When I started primary school I was the only visibly non-white kid: half Australian, half Chinese Malaysian, learning early what “different” looked like. Later, when my parents moved me to a bigger primary school (largely due to being bullied), my brother and I were two of the very few kids who were visibly Asian or mixed-Asian. 

​By the time boys entered the picture in late primary school and high school, I’d already learned what “pretty” meant - white, blonde, familiar - and I knew I wasn’t it.

​My mum migrated from Malaysia, bringing with her the smell of soy and sesame, the stories of migration, and the insistence on thrift and nourishment.

Within me I carried her accent, her cooking, her lineage... and also the subtle and not-so-subtle lessons that difference was something to control. In the 1990s, any lunchboxes that stood out were teased: honey soy chicken wings, Chinese New Year leftovers, anything that earned me the "ching chong chinaman" taunt. I learned to avoid them. Sandwiches and pies were safer. “Normal.”

It took decades to understand how that small-town survival strategy was rooted in something much older and larger: colonialism’s long shadow over food, body, and belonging.
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Tolle causam. Identify and treat the causes.

Naturopaths, herbalists and holistic nutritionists - we all pride ourselves on treating holistically, not symptomatically. We know symptoms are not random defects but attempts by the body to adapt, recover, and heal.

But what if our profession’s understanding of “root cause” has itself been uprooted from its origins?

What if the systems that taught us to “fix” and “purify” the body were shaped by the same colonial worldviews that divided nature from culture, and reason from intuition?

As Sabrina Strings shows in Fearing the Black Body, Western medicine and wellness alike inherited a moral code that tied discipline, restraint, and whiteness to health. Modern diet culture - and much of what passes as “clean” or “natural” living - still carries this legacy.

If our goal is Tolle Causam, then we can’t stop at physiology. We have to trace the roots right down, deep down into the soil of culture, power, and history. Because disordered eating, weight stigma, and body shame are not individual failures.

They’re predictable outcomes of a system that worships control and pathologises difference.

When we start to see diet culture and disordered eating through that lens, it’s clear they aren’t personal failings - they’re colonial inheritances.

Our profession didn’t create these hierarchies, but we HAVE absorbed them. They show up every time “balance” is framed as self-discipline, every time “toxins” are blamed instead of trauma, every time we mistake restriction for healing.

Decolonising wellness means recognising that many of our “root cause” approaches were built within a white, Western worldview that equated thinness, discipline, and control with virtue. As Sabrina Strings (2019) shows in Fearing the Black Body, modern fatphobia emerged from the same racial hierarchies that defined who was seen as civilised or worthy. These hierarchies still echo in the way we talk about “clean eating,” “toxins,” and “fixing” the body.

This is where naturopathy, for all its holistic intentions, can lose its roots.

When our clinical gaze is shaped by colonial ideals of control and purity, we risk reproducing the very harm we claim to heal.

And yet, there are two glaring blind spots where we often forget this principle in practice:

• Prescribing weight loss as a treatment for chronic conditions like type 2 diabetes, PCOS, cardiovascular disease, and infertility.
• Failing to recognise and address eating disorders and disordered eating, which themselves are often the deeper causes of digestive, endocrine, reproductive, and mental health presentations.

When we reduce health to body weight, we mistake correlation for causation... and we ignore the true roots.