Once upon a time, a beautiful princess decided she wanted to have a baby. So she instantly fell pregnant and ​had a perfect pregnancy where she grew a "cute little" bump and didn't gain weight in any other part of her body. Her face didn't explode with pimples in the first trimester whilst her body adjusted to the crazy hormone fluctuations, and she was never EVER a mega bitch to her husband, the prince.

She kept exercising five times a week and eating one salad a day throughout her whole pregnancy like a respectable lady ought to. Then she had a wonderful birth and the next week returned to her pre-baby body so she could continue her life as a professional fitness model as if nothing happened.

Her belly never resembled a cake sagging in the middle from overdoing the baking powder. She never once accidentally shat her pants or peed whilst reaching for a box of cereal in the supermarket, no way. And her baby was perfect and sleeping through the night by zero weeks of age, just in case you were wondering.  And she lived happily ever after. The end.

...

So many normal and necessary changes happen to a woman’s body - and life - during pregnancy and after birth. And yet society and the media gloss over all the (literally) shitty stuff and instead feed us the unicorn fairytale version of what motherhood and parenting is "supposed" to look like.

No where is this more evident than in the whole idea of getting your "pre-baby body" back.

Diet culture is relentless in sending new mothers messages about needing to fix their so-called imperfections - that they need to "bounce back", lose the baby weight, and flatten their newly soft and stretched tummies within weeks.

Sadly, the way many new mums attempt to live up to this impossible standard is through restrictive dieting and over-zealous exercise, often taken on before the pelvic floor and abdomen have had a chance to repair. Neither of which are in the best interests of mum or baby, especially if mum is breastfeeding.

I've taken the last year and a half off teaching yoga. Some people assume I've just continued to teach and are mildly surprised when I tell them I'm not actually teaching. Others have noticed my absence and have been asking me when I'll start teaching again.

I know I've been especially missed by the (wonderful) AcroYoga community on the Gold Coast. ​The last yoga event I lead was a couples restorative AcroYoga workshop over 18 months ago. It was a gorgeous workshop and fully booked out. The people who attended were super sweet and provided such encouraging feedback. The staff at the host studio were incredibly helpful, down to earth and lovely. And I had a fantastic time teaching it.

​I receive near-weekly emails from curious newbies asking when I'll be teaching my next Acro workshop or class. I politely turn them away and direct them instead to other teachers.

The best reason I can come up with for my absence from the yoga world?

I just haven't felt like teaching yoga.

And more to the point, up until recently I have pretty much taken the last year and a half off from practising yoga.

Yep. No personal practice, besides the odd yoga class every few months, and some meditation in between looking after a newborn who is now a toddler (i.e. extremely sporadic meditation). My preferred form of movement switched from pre-baby trail running, daily vinyasa riddled with handstands and AcroYoga... to walking, reformer pilates and strength training to prepare for and recover from childbirth, and to build the strength I need to haul a toddler around without putting my back out.

I QUIT YOGA. Turned my back on it almost completely. After over a decade of reasonably dedicated practice and nearly as long teaching.

Why?

Basically, two reasons:

1. Once I gave birth to my first child (and probably a bit before that), the personal yoga practice I knew and loved - the dynamic, dance-like, acrobatic, yang-centred practice that is so celebrated in modern yoga culture - suddenly felt like total shit.

2. I had a gutful of how wanky it had all become.
​

Nowadays it's hard to dodge those stupid memes about the new skinny. You know, the ones proclaiming that,

"Fit is the new skinny."

Or

"Strong is the new skinny."

Or even

​"Curvy is the new skinny."

As if we needed yet another standard to live up to replace skinny!  #facepalm

​Whilst thin may no longer be (quite as) in, we are now seeing a migration towards the FIT IDEAL.

The fit ideal, or even the fit-with-curves ideal, are new ideals that are frequently celebrated and portrayed as "real" - as in "real girls have muscles" or even the seemingly more inclusive (but clearly far less inclusive when said aloud) "real girls have muscles AND curves."

In all honesty, this new fit ideal is just another unrealistic and painfully limited aspiration of beauty - albeit disguised as health - that excludes the majority of women while pretending to accommodate them.

We really may as well be saying "SPIKY, SCALY, HERMAPHRODITIC, AND WITH RAINBOW DNA is the new skinny." It would be just as "inclusive".

​When will we all just make peace with the fact that women come in a billion different shapes, sizes, sexual orientations, colours, degrees of ability and disability, and body compositions, and that ALL of these bodies are OK?

By slightly shifting a narrow standard of beauty that places pressure on women to conform, with no regard given to which of the billion different and natural body types an individual was born with, we see the same obsessive, compulsive, unhealthy thoughts and behaviours that "the old skinny" standard generated - restrictive dieting, compulsive exercise, dangerous overtraining, and yes,  body hate.

Mermaids. Unicorns. Goddesses. Walk into a yoga studio these days and you'll probably spot a few of them.

You may even find yourself swamped in a glittery sea of them, depending on where you are. Self-proclaimed mythical creatures with an incredible yoga practice that makes a beginner want to give up then and there.

Fully grown, fully bendy women, doused in designer mala beads and describing themselves in fairy tale rhetoric. 

I was one of them.

​Sans rhetoric. But the intent to be a rockstar yogi? That glitter-coated ego? That was there all right. 

"I don't diet. I just eat clean."

To the uninitiated eye, our obsession with dieting and weight loss seems to have blown over. No longer do we partake in "old school" diets like counting calories or cutting out fat (so 80's!) - although such trends still flicker in our peripheral vision.

Look a tiny bit closer and you'll see that diet culture is anything but dead.

Nowadays, "wellness" is the new buzz word. We hear lithe actresses, bikini models, celebrity chefs and even some nutritionists espousing lines like, "Don't diet. Just eat clean!"

As if they were different things.

​Clean eating, in the way said actresses are promoting it, is the newest form of dietary restriction. Juice cleansing is the new starvation diet. Detox cuisine is the newest in privileged, "healthy" girl food.

Far from moving out of the dark ages and truly renouncing diet culture, we have merely fallen into the next age of dieting, one that manifests as counting macros and cutting out carbs. In my opinion, this modern chapter of "wellness" dieting creates just as much, if not more, disordered eating and eating disorders as the old school stuff - at least that form of dieting didn't pretend to not be dieting!
​

Short and sweet today...

We all know supermodels seem thinner than almost anyone we know or see regularly. We also know magazine images are airbrushed and manipulated so much the supermodels don't even look like themselves.

Supermodels must be 18% body fat or less. Did you know a woman's normal hormonal cycle can be interrupted at body fat percentages lower than 17 or 18 per cent? (This is the level required to have 'washboard' abs or a '6 pack' - it is too low for many women and girls.)

If not dieting, then what? - Dr. Rick Kausman

This is the book that stopped me in my raw vegan, juice-fasting til 4pm tracks and lovingly encouraged me to start facing the fact that my relationship with food and my body had become disordered. I devoured most of this book in one day, and was forever changed. This book literally turned me in the HAES, non-dieting and body-positive direction, a trajectory I humbly continue to travel to this day.

Dr Rick Kausman is a general practitioner and the founding father of the non-diet approach in Australia. Years later I met Dr Rick in person at one of his if not dieting health professional trainings, and can confirm that he is an incredibly compassionate and sweet man who walks his talk. If you're sick of dieting and want to discover that there is an alternative to restriction and body hatred, this easy to read book will get you started. It feels like Dr Rick is talking to you in person.

Health at Every Size: The surprising truth about your weight - Dr. Linda Bacon

A little more data and research-heavy than If not dieting, this book presents the argument for shifting our focus well and truly away from weight and towards actual health. I've been lucky enough to meet from Dr Linda Bacon and she too is a quietly-spoken woman with a refreshingly calm demeanour who is passionate about her work. If you're still a skeptic about the whole HAES thing and want cold hard well-researched evidence as to not only why diets don't work, but why they actually contribute to weight and body image problems - then this is the book for you.

​
Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works - Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch

Written by two dietitians who really GET IT and have spent decades in the field, this is an experiential book with heaps of practical suggestions and activities, as well as patient stories to inspire and demonstrate the effectiveness of this work. I find myself coming back to this classic again and again because I've found that learning intuitive eating is a must when it comes to healing one's relationship with food and their body. The authors break the concept of intuitive eating down into 10 manageable chunks such as, "how to reject diet mentality forever, "how to find satisfaction in your eating", and "how to feel your feelings without using food".

This book basically explains how to stop dieting and start listening to your body. It's not the be all and end all to healing relationship with food, since a huge chunk of that involves extensive body image work. But learning intuitive eating is a vital starting point.