"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.
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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.

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.
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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?"

I have a question for you.

Which one factor is absolutely fundamental to women having a healthy sex drive?

Is it having "the ideal body", which we're convinced will make us the desire of every man?
Is it owning and wearing the most exquisite lingerie you can buy?
Is it being a yogi - gymnast so you can act out the entire Kamasutra without breaking a sweat?
Is it re-training your brain to think, breathe and live sex by mulling over your sexual fantasies and doing libido-boosting visualisations daily?
Is it having a sexually adventurous, Samantha Jones-esque personality and not being afraid to search sex shops far and wide for the latest and greatest toys?
Is it being comfortable with and well-practised at masturbation so you're familiar with what your body likes?
Is it being assertive and vocal in bed, and being able to confidently ask for what you want?

It's NONE of these. Whilst some of these are important ingredients to a healthy sex life, there's a HUGELY fundamental sex drive-promoting necessity that's glaringly absent from this list.

The most important thing you can do as far as your desire for sex goes?

It's having enough fat on your body.

Yep, having enough or ample fat, not as little fat as possible.

​If, like most women, you're weight loss dieting... if you're partly starving and/or overexercising your body to get down to or maintain the levels of body fat approaching that of fitness and fashion models (the official body type desired by the average woman in our culture because we think it will buy sexuality)... 

... then your fertility, your sexual desire, your fitness, your energy levels, and of course your overall health, will actually suffer.

​And without these things, even the most dedicated Kamasutra practitioner, sex toy aficionada, "perfect" figured gym-bunny, or modern woman with sex communication skills of steel will not be able to get it on... let alone get off.

I recently came across a celebrity trainer's 12 week weight loss program that really got my goat. Nothing new there, same old shit about restricting calories in via dieting and doing mega workouts to "burn calories off." Same old cheesy marketing and aesthetically pleasing presentation of just enough accurate information intermingled with bullcrap to confuse the majority of consumers who are not savvy about diet culture's sneaky AF ways.

But what really upset me - even more than the same old rubbish - was that as an extension of this dreadful program there were weight loss plans for pregnant and postpartum women. Complete with daily caloric "allowances" for these groups of women.

There is so much wrong with this I don't even know where to start. The quest for "body after baby" is massively prevalent in our society and it's harmful to both women and their babies.

​Pregnancy is not the time to try to lose weight. And postpartum is one of the riskiest times in a woman's life for developing or worsening an eating disorder.

The caloric allowances allotted to these vulnerable groups of women on this particular diet plan are scarily misinformed, and dangerous. This is the kind of stuff that sets women up for deteriorating body image and developing eating disorders during and after the vulnerable time that is pregnancy.

But before we get to that, let's start with why calorie counting in the first place is a waste of time.

As a non-diet dietitian who loves food, you won't be surprised to hear that I rarely talk calories or kilojoules with my clients – unless its to point out they need more. There are so many flaws with the general idea of counting calories, including:

• calorie counting grossly over-simplifies the ways body weight is determined and encourages subscription to the "just ensure calories in is less than calories out" mentality towards weight control. With this polarised lens, we forget the many other factors that influence body weight just as much if not far more than food and activity, including genetics, stigma, socioeconomic factors, stress, sleep deprivation, hormonal imbalances, environmental toxicity, gut bacteria, etc
• calorie content (calculated in food laboratories by bomb calorimetry or indirect calorie estimation) reported on packaged food labels can be off by as much as 20% due to variations in manufacturing, season, and suppliers.
• similarly, the calorie content of whole foods is wildly unpredictable. Two similar-sized Fuji apples can have vastly different calorie contents due to the soil and climate they're grown in, the time of season they're harvested, how they've been handled after picking, and how they're prepared.
• calorie counting doesn't take into account the type or quality of food you're eating (and it matters.)

• calorie counting is far more difficult and inaccurate than people think, whether in regards to calculating food intake or calories used in exercise. Under or over reporting is common and human.
• calorie counting does not factor in the immense individual variation in metabolic rate. BMR calculators can be off by 20% or more, in which case, is it really worth calculating?
• calorie counting is also complicated by variations in individuals' muscle mass, amount and type of physical and mental activity, and many other totally random and unpredictable genetic factors that we may not even be aware of, let alone have the capacity to plug into a caloric requirements calculator.

Then of course there's the elephant in the room: that weight loss dieting - whether by calorie counting and food restriction or some other method - does not work.

But myths abound over how much women should be eating. In conversations with women with weight concern, I notice a lot of magic calorie numbers being thrown around when it comes to how many daily calories they think they should be eating: 800? 1200? 1500? 1800?

And just how much more do you need to eat when pregnant or breastfeeding - "because this celebrity trainer says it's x" (P.S. she's terribly, dangerously wrong.)

So just this once, let's talk frankly about calories.
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​Sound familiar? Let's clear something up. Dieting – whether a fad, old school diet, a “detox,” or a “lifestyle” – is not just a verb; it’s an entire way of thinking that pivots on the intention of losing or controlling weight. It is both an individual mentality, and a cultural paradigm.

​So let's be super clear: Dieting is any approach to food and eating that is centred around weight loss or weight control. 

The roots of dieting are diet mentality, and diet mentality is fertilised by diet culture. And no matter how abusive dieting is to our bodies or our minds, millions of people continue to cling to it.

It can be easy to think you're not dieting, even if you are. So here I'll list three main types of diets so you know what you're looking for when it comes to slaying that diet mentality.

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.

"I'm not dieting - I'm doing this for my health."

Everyone knows that diets fail about 95% of the time. If you don't know it statistically, you've probably experienced it personally - that crushing weight rebound after the initial euphoria of weight loss.

The fact that dieting sets people up to fail is spreading, and old school diet programs such as Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig are becoming less popular.

FIST PUMPS! The old school dieting industry is on the decline! This is indeed cause for celebration.

But whilst I hear plenty of people declaring "I've given up dieting," a closer look at their eating habits and food beliefs says otherwise. They may no longer be doing weekly-weigh-ins or counting calories, but the dieting thoughts remain.

"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!
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