Cleansing from a western fad perspective is pure diet culture BS. But in Ayurveda the "C" word takes on a somewhat different, multifaceted meaning. This can be both problematic and refreshing depending on your perspective. 

In this episode I interview Narayana Commerford, Ayurvedic Lifestyle Consultant, Yoga Teacher, and owner of Evolution Botanicals.

In this episode:

• How Ayurveda didn’t accompany yoga to the west, and the effects of this on contemporary yoga practice
• Different spiritual practices (e.g. Vipassana, Tantra) are not suited to everyone
• Everything can be medicine or harmful, depending on context
• Your constitution informs the medicine you need
• Diet culture vs. the introspective curiosity inherent to Ayurveda
• Ojas, or vitality: is your “cleanse” giving you that?
• Cleanses are effective at short-term weight loss, but not effective at long-term weight loss
• Keeping digestion healthy is key in Ayurveda
• Cleanses and fasting can disrupt agni and metabolism, and aggravate vata
• The Magic Bullet Syndrome: cleanses won’t fix the lifestyle problems causing your health issues in the first place
• Nara’s experience with chronic fatigue, discovering how stressful dieting was on his body, and how he recovered

Post-interview solo:

• Navigating the touchy issue of Ayurvedic “cleansing” amidst the sea of diet culture and accusations of pseudo-science
• The differences between a juice cleanse, and pancha karma or “cleansing” in the traditional Ayurvedic sense
• Where I feel a few days of kitchari might be appropriate, and where it definitely would not be appropriate
• Hardcore cleanses in Ayurveda

Links: 
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Nara’s company Evolution Botanicals
Website: https://evolutionbotanicals.com.au/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/evolutionbotanicals
Instagram: @evolutionbotanicals
Non-Diet Yogi Patreon

Pre-launch waiting list for interest in Casey’s Non-Diet Ayurveda Course:
https://www.funkyforest.com.au/courses.html
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Casey's 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

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

Grab your free e-book The Modern Yogi's BS-Free Guide to Wellbeing

Funky Forest Health & Wellbeing Facebook page

Instagram @nondietyogi  @caseyaconroy  @funkyforesthealth
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Support the show
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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've been on this juice fast for 5 days now, and I feel AH-MAAAAZ-ING!"

"Keto is the best thing I've ever done. After 2 weeks of low-carb I have SO much energy!!"

"Why didn't I try intermittent fasting sooner? I've lost x kg AND need LESS sleep!"

"I've quit sugar and my skin is SO clear."

"Since going raw vegan my periods have stopped, but I've heard that's a sign my body is getting cleaner." (This one's the absolute worst).


Newbies to diets (yes, these are all wellness DIETS, not healthy, sustainable "lifestyle changes") fill online forums with tales of renewed health, regained vitality, happiness... and of course, weight loss. It's enough to make any unsatisfied online wellness trawler jump on board the next media-sensationalised dietary fad.

In fact maybe YOU are on day 7 of your juice cleanse / bulletproof coffee experiment / I Quit Sugar challenge, and you're feeling so good you've decided to become a health coach and "detox the world".

But friend, you need to understand that what you are experiencing is the dietary equivalent of The Honeymoon Period. You feel great and you truly believe that you've found the fountain of eternal youth and vitality.

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.
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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:

Starting a baby eating solids is a time of great trepidation for many parents. This might be because this transition from exclusive breastfeeding or formula feeding to family foods (which starts around 6 months and continues until between 18 and 24 months) is a very vulnerable time.

It's a time when patterns like "fussy" or picky eating, or babies not eating enough to meet their requirements can sneak in, leading to malnutrition or failure to thrive. Delays in developmental milestones around feeding can and often do occur unless good feeding and eating practices are set up, ideally from the start.

And of course, there's always the fear of choking.

No wonder this time can be such a big cause of stress for parents.

But in spite of the clear importance of this transition period, I don't think that it needs to be stressful or scary. I actually think that starting your baby on solids can be an enjoyable, fun and even relaxing time for kids and parents.

And in fact, by taking a deep breath and chilling out you can actually help your child learn to feed themselves in a timely manner, get all the nutrition they need, and have fun doing it.

​I have a 12 month old and a 3 year old and they have both been proficient, happy little eaters for as long as I can remember. Here's how I navigated starting my kids on solids when they were around 6 months old, and beyond, all whilst being responsibly lazy.
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