Yoga teachers, please stop giving terrible dietary advice to your students. This episode is based on an article I wrote in 2017. You will also hear my two year-old mumbling in the background. Whatcha gonna do.

In this episode:

• That time I gave terrible nutritional advice
• Why people ask yoga teachers for nutritional advice
• Some of the crappy nutritional advice yoga teachers pass on to their students
• The perils of getting nutrition advice from a yoga teacher, personal trainer, or health coach
• The likely prevalence of disordered eating in yoga circles
• MLM health products in yoga studios
  
• Even when yoga teachers are also nutritionists, be careful!
• Where to go for safe, individualised dietary guidance

​LINKS:
Original blog post:
https://www.funkyforest.com.au/blog/yoga-teachers-please-stop-giving-terrible-dietary-advice-to-your-students

Funky Forest Health & Wellbeing - online non-diet nutrition consulting services and in-person yoga classes

Grab your copy of my e-book The Modern Yogi's BS-Free Guide to Wellbeing

Funky Forest Health & Wellbeing Facebook page

Casey's Instagram

Support the show at Non-Diet Yogi Patreon
​

Why is juice cleansing so popular in yoga culture? In this solo episode I take a deep dive and try to answer this question.

I also give a crash course in how detoxification actually works, and what you can do to support your body's detoxification processes without starving yourself.

In this episode:

• What is juice cleansing? How it’s marketed vs. what’s actually going on
• Why it’s so popular in yoga culture
• How tapas and saucha may underlie and amplify the tendency towards spiritually-endorsed disordered eating and body dysmorphia
• Ayurveda and juice cleansing
• Disordered eating and eating disorders in Yogaland
• My personal experiences with harsh yoga practices, fasting and orthorexia
• The physiology of detoxification and how juice cleanses impede this
• Why those initial “detox symptoms” and later, that feeling of “energised bliss” occur on a juice cleanse (it’s not what you think)
• What you can do to safely support detoxification (if you wish to do so)
• The next level of cray: water fasting in yoga circles

LINKS: 
My articles on Ayurveda, TCM and Intuitive Eating:
https://www.funkyforest.com.au/blog/ayurveda-tcm-intuitive-eating-or-dietary-dogma
https://www.funkyforest.com.au/blog/beyond-pitta-kapha-vata-ayurveda-tcm-intuitive-eating

A biomedical look at the physiology of detoxification, how juice cleanses impede this, and what you can do to support detoxification:
https://www.funkyforest.com.au/blog/detoxification-so-not-about-juice-fasts-colonics
https://www.funkyforest.com.au/blog/your-bodys-lifelong-detoxification-kit

My article on the stress response of restrictive eating:
https://www.funkyforest.com.au/blog/the-honeymoon-period

Funky Forest Health & Wellbeing - online non-diet nutrition consulting services and in-person yoga classes

Grab your copy of my e-book The Modern Yogi's BS-Free Guide to Wellbeing

Funky Forest Health & Wellbeing Facebook page

Casey's Instagram

Support the show at Non-Diet Yogi Patreon

Errrrmaghaaad so it's finally happening.. I've released the first episode of my new podcast!

I warmly invite you to gather your earholes and tune in to the Non-Diet Yogi Podcast, where we explore yoga, earth-based living and gentle nutrition through a non-diet lens. 
 
We will explore the wonderful, wacky and sometimes worrying places where the yoga world and diet culture overlap, as well as exploring how social justice, feminism, motherhood and bunch of other things all jive together within the Yogaland/diet culture Venn diagram.

In this episode:

• Why this podcast needs to exist
• Creating a podcast as a mum
• A bit about me, including my personal and professional experiences with disordered eating and yoga culture
• Why living and working on the Gold Coast (the L.A. of Australia!) was the perfect petri dish for developing Non-Diet Yogi
• The need for the non-diet approach in the natural medicine sphere, and vice versa

Having been a guest on a couple of fantastic anti-diet podcasts myself, I am excited (and shitting myself just a tad) to join some of the great minds floating around in the Podosphere. My wish is to bring the non-diet approach, Health at Every Size and social justice savvy to the yoga and "wellness" space where I believe it is sorely needed.

​I hope you enjoy!!

"I have my period. So I mustn't have an eating disorder."

For years I thought that if a woman was menstruating regularly, she was displaying one of the ultimate signs of health.

​I thought that if a woman had a regular period she must be well nourished. That the moment her caloric intake dipped below her requirements, her body would stop ovulating and periods would disappear.
​
That Mother Nature never lets our bodies grow babies -  a highly energy intensive endeavour that demands massive amounts of resources - in a perceived famine.

For years, I was wrong.

​In my time as an eating disorder dietitian, student naturopath, and having lived through an (undiagnosed but still very harmful) eating disorder, I have learnt a thing or two about periods and under eating. Here I'll attempt to bust some common myths around periods, fertility and disordered eating.

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:

I agree with the notion that a witch is a woman (or man, but I'm mainly talking to women within my platforms) in her power. And a woman can only be in her power by regularly listening to, honing, and trusting her intuition.

Intuition is rooted in the body. Think of the words we use to describe intuitive hunches: I had a gut feeling. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I felt it in my bones. I knew it in my heart.

Think of the times your intuitive, instinctual nature has kicked into gear. When somebody has stepped into your space and something feels "not quite right". When you know your child is in danger and you check they're still in their sandpit only to realise they're about to cross the road by themselves.

When you sense the presence of a loved one who has passed on, something around 75% of us report having experienced. When you recognise a soul mate or lifelong friend by how your heart feels and the tingles running down your spine. These are usually gut feelings, a body sense. Not calculations you've made in your head.

Dieting and the religion of thinness have cut down many a modern day witch, leaving a gaping hole in our collective wisdom and capacity to heal ourselves and others.

For women whose slavery to the thin ideal has cut them off from their full witchy capacity, intuitive eating is a way to open a doorway to intuitive living. As I once heard another non-diet advocate say, "Intuitive eating, intuitive EVERYTHING."

Intuitive eating asks that we begin listening to the hunger and fullness cues of our bodies. But that's not all. It also offers ways to reject the diet mentality and let go of the religion of thinness so pervasive in our cultural and inherited conditioning. 

One caveat: If you've been chronically dieting, or you're in a semi-starved state, listening to and honouring your hunger and fullness can be difficult and complicated. This is where getting help from a non-diet practitioner can be of great value to re-nourish your body first so you can begin to receive and interpret those messages correctly.

Witches don't diet. It's impossible to be deeply connected to your intuition while you're still tracking macros like there's no tomorrow, you're not eating enough, or you're deadly afraid of carbs. 

Getting a balanced, satisfying and adequate intake of food can ease mood swings, panic attacks, anxiety, and mild depression. Mental health takes a dive when we're in a state of semi-starvation as the body struggles to construct all the neurotransmitters it needs to remain healthy. Intellectual clarity and intuition is improved when the mind receives proper nourishment. 

It's time to stop wasting your energy on the illusion of weight loss or maintaining a low weight as if that's the most important thing in life. It's not. 

Sister, we need you. Now is the time to hone your craft, shine your light and offer your healing gifts, and dieting is only stopping you from reaching your magical potential. The world needs your witchy-poo self, and it needs it now.
​

I work with a lot of yoginis and yogis, alternative lifestyle leaders, animal rights activists, and environmentally conscious folks. I also work in the field of disordered eating.

​So naturally I often find myself in the situation where I'm chatting with somebody who is very keen to heal their troubled relationship with food... but they don't want to budge on their vegan ideals. 
 
This person may have been through the psychological hell that is a full blown eating disorder...

... OR they may fall into the spectrum of disordered eating on the end of the continuum that wouldn't be classified as a clinical eating disorder, but disordered eating and disordered body image - an issue that faces a significant number of women in Australia.
 
OFTEN, they've experienced both.
 
The big question here is, "If I'm actively recovering from a clinical eating disorder - or any other form of disordered eating - can I be vegan and still get better?"