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've waxed lyrical about my disdain for the commodification of yoga and how until very recently, it drove me away from yoga for nearly two years. You can read me being all anti-mainstream yoga Ranty McRantus, here.

But the other big reason I quit yoga was this: ​after I gave birth to my first child, my personal yoga practice was feeling spiritually unfulfilling. And physically depleting as hell. 

Following Archie's birth, the yoga I knew and loved - the dynamic, acrobatic, energetic practice full of dance and strong postures, inversions and fast flow - it just no longer... worked. It was not giving me the vitality, peace and stillness it once did.
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It has taken many painful mistakes, a near-complete abstinence from yoga for a time, and a rediscovery of yoga at a deeper level for me to come out the other side. Here's what happened after I had my first baby, and how you can avoid making the same mistakes I did.
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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.
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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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So, I'm planning to have another baby.

Whilst some women shy away from telling people about their conception plans, I'm a massive over-sharer with an excitable soul! So what better way to revise my fertility nutrition basics in preparation for polishing up my own baby making equipment, than to share this information with you too.

I figure that since I've now had one kid, I have a little bit more personal experience to refer to than I did a couple of years ago, BC (before child).

​Nowadays, I also have more professional experience working with women of all sizes who have worked with me to improve their fertility - some "overweight", some "normal weight", some a little "underweight" as far as medical BMI ranges go - and nearly all have been able to fall pregnant by focussing exclusively on their HEALTH.

This experience flies in the face of the advice of many doctors, scientists, and health professionals that "overweight people just need to lose weight" in order to fall pregnant.

So before we dive into my fertility boosting essentials that I work on with clients who wish to conceive, it's really important that you understand one important thing. This is so important that it's actually the first of the fertility-boosting tips I want to discuss. To fall pregnant, you must...
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"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!
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