A call to naturopaths to embrace a weight neutral approach to practice.

Primum non nocere. First, do no harm.

​This is the first tenet of the naturopathic oath we all take on graduation day from college, and the most critical.

​As naturopaths we strive not to add to the burden of problems of our patients. To refrain from further damaging their physical, mental or emotional wellbeing. To not intervene in such a way that will in any way harm.

Doing nothing is better than doing something that will cause harm.

In many ways, we are very good at abiding by this foundational tenet.

And yet... there is something insidious going on within the naturopathic profession that has not been called out. And despite our best intentions, it is doing serious harm to our patients, our profession, and ourselves.

That thing is a weight focussed approach to health. Whether directly or indirectly, promoting weight loss does irrefutable harm.

Even if it's weight loss "for health". Or weight loss "for fertility". Or weight loss just for the sake of weight loss, because "who doesn't want to be a bit leaner?"

To illustrate my point I'll set the scene. The other week I received two emails: one from a very well known nutraceuticals company promoting its weight loss seminar to naturopaths and other natural health professionals. The other was the exact same email, forwarded on to me from a major natural medicine education institution to its students.

This is not okay.

As I'll illustrate shortly, a focus on weight loss does unequivocal harm. This is in direct opposition to the first and most crucial naturopathic tenet.

It's 2019, and I propose that it's time that practitioners in the field of naturopathic medicine universally adopted a non-diet, weight neutral, Health at Every Size approach. For the sake of our clients, our best practice, and for the future longevity and validity of our profession, we must steer the ship away from the weight-centric doctrine it is starting to (and arguably, has) become and back towards true preventative and holistic medicine.

The kind of medicine that naturopathy sprang from. The kind of medicine that does no harm. The kind of medicine that treats the whole person, not a number on the scales.

For some years I've been interested in organic gardening, particularly permaculture. Recently I've taken a deeper dive into this method of 'natural' farming within which is embedded a deep reverence for, and trust of nature. And I've realised that permaculture has some uncanny parallels to the non-diet approach and Health at Every Size movement I am so passionate about in my clinical practice. For the last 7 or so years I've been working with people with weight, food and body image concerns, from wanting to lose a couple of kilograms to life threatening eating disorders.

One of the greatest teachers of this method of farming is Masanobu Fukuoka, author of The One-Straw Revolution. In this book Fukuoka describes his discovery of "do nothing" farming, where he creates situations where nature will do the work with the minimum of interference on his part.

So instead of spending hours ploughing the soil or spending money on adding chemical fertilisers to his crops, he simply chucks the rice straw back on the ground after harvesting it and scatters chook poo over it. Occasionally he sows clover to use as a green manure.

​And that's pretty much it.

And rather than seeing everything turn into a wilderness and watching helplessly as the prickles take over, Fukuoka actually equals the yield of farms that have had these modern high intervention inputs applied to them, with a fraction of the investment of labour and resources.
​

Of course by "healthy weight" I don't mean what the BMI deems healthy. I adopt Dr. Rick Kausman's description of your healthiest weight being the most comfortable, natural weight for you - the weight your body naturally arrives at and maintains when we provide the right "soil" (see number 2). So here's what I gathered together in my current understanding of permaculture principles and my more deeply rooted understanding of HAES and the non-diet approach. The biggest parallels between permaculture, and the non-diet approach and HAES as roads to body peace, are:

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.
​

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 the Gwyneth Paltrows of the world 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.

And like every other type of dieting before it, clean eating is the penultimate in ladylike behaviour.

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!
​

Body image. 

It’s the way we perceive our bodies, and the way we assume others perceive us. And it’s the thoughts, feelings, attitudes and beliefs we have about our bodies as a result.

The key word here is perceive. Body image is not based on fact.

It is learned.

Learned from our society’s manufactured and constantly changing ideals of beauty, health and fitness. Learned from relatives, friends and other people in our lives. Learned from the cultures and environments we have been exposed to.

Body image is a huge topic. Before listing 20 of my favourite signs that your body image is on the mend, I want to disclose that I am a cis-het biracial woman with thin privilege. This article is geared towards women in particular, because that is my lived experience. I can’t begin to imagine how many more magnitudes of difficulty are involved in body image work for those who are not gender conforming, are BIPOC, and/or live in a larger body, an older body, or a disabled body.

I believe that we all deserve to accept, respect, appreciate and enjoy our bodies and all that they do for us - regardless of size, weight, shape, colour, race, ability, and gender.

I also recognise that developing more body satisfaction, confidence, love, acceptance, or even body neutrality will look and feel different for everyone. 

And that this can be fucking hard work.