Hi, it’s me, the mom of an eight-year-old child who is currently picking off small pieces of coloured tape I put on the floor because some Montessori Mom’s Instagram account said this would distract him long enough for me to take a break and read. Well, it didn’t. What else am I supposed to do? Oh yeah, go to work.

I still have my job, (lucky these days!) and worked different hours through different lockdowns with the schools sometimes open, sometimes closed. I developed plans to hot-air-balloon myself to Germany without getting shot down, and binge-watched YouTube tutorials on how to sew a mask that is no longer allowed to wear. I planned parties and disinvited people again because of another lockdown. Then regulations were about to get a little less discriminatory only to end up right back to Omicron’s venom-style takeover and a collective system-wide shrug of “Well, I guess we are all gonna get this thing anyway” attitude while keeping the mandatory vaccination law in mind just to get angry again.

So, here’s where I am at: I am building a boat, stocking it with teachers and principles, putting my child on it, and floating it out to shark-infested waters. Once it sets sail, I am taking a 50-hour nap, reading and writing for hours while drinking nerve-calming herbal tea all day.

Honestly, I should have thought of this style of “distance learning” years ago. What mom wouldn’t ship their child to be normally educated without lockdown and these dumb COVID measurements (mask while playing with friends at the gym, 15 minutes mask break outdoors and all this bullshit) from sunrise to sunset? It is better than waiting for schools to shut down for widely unpredictable timeframes that force me to discuss with my boss if I can take Monday off again (how this will look… there might be a pattern) like an FBI hostage negotiator. All these problems could be easily solved with my “distance learning solution”.

So, back to my boat. There will be reliable around-the-clock childcare that isn’t some au pair who keeps eating your expensive chocolate and drinks all your booze! Now, you may think, a standard boat that serves as a classroom isn’t protection again COVID, and that’s where the sharks come in. Sharks! A school on a boat surrounded by sharks means nobody goes in or out. No more random indoor playdates with asymptotic siblings that set off frantic contact K1 tracing phone insanity. No more teachers showing up on Monday after someone sneezed on them at the grocery store on Friday afternoon and this person may have had COVID but had a negative test and no symptoms. Schools closed again, all classes dismissed. No! This won’t happen. Have you ever heard of a shark getting COVID? NO! Sharks will eat COVID for freaking breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Yes, that also means any visiting parents risk being eaten alive by sharks, but when you start missing your kid really badly and get the urge to take a swim, just remember the time he walked in on you in the bathroom and was so upset you wouldn’t come to play that he knocked your phone into the toilet and YOU fished it out realizing he didn’t flush after peeing. Hey, let’s be honest here: You can hug him when he is seventeen, and finished with puberty because that is how long this monkey-bred, bat-spit-festering, lab-grown virus “plandemic” will be most likely around.

Plus, he will be floating somewhere in nature without Wi-Fi. Real wildlife! I mean, some sharks, but mostly nature. No more screens! No more begging to re-watch Sing, Shrek 1-4, or all the episodes of Hotel Transylvania. No more shoving an iPad into his Nutella paws and being relieved but also alarmed at his tech fluency. Instead, he will be surrounded by a permanent network of teachers he can touch, hug, and tag. He will never again have to wonder why he cannot have playdates with his friends. He won’t have to throw tantrums because he is also sick of watching your exhausted face alternate between crying, laughing, yelling, and then crying again. He won’t have the small normalcy of his little life disrupted over and over again in an unceasing unpredictable spiral.

Okay, you would never send your kid on this boat, I get it. The idea is still kinda cool for some “tough” days though. So, take a deep breath and after you have taken your child to bed, swallowed your fifth glass of wine, and read this essay while worrying about whether boat distance learning would hurt him, whether your marriage is failing, whether your seven-day headache is cancer, whether you are drinking enough water, whether you are enough for all the people that need you to be something – know that everyone, everywhere, on this entire burnt-out planet, feels exactly the same way. And despite the massive raging shitstorm we are facing, we are still in this thing, but if you can watch my kid so I can listen to this mandatory vaccination talk on Austrian TV without losing my mind, I swear to god, I will build this motherfucking boat for all of us.

Have you struggled with fears, obsessions, or feelings of guilt or shame around your food choices? Or perhaps you’ve found yourself stuck in a cycle of “starting fresh tomorrow”, or restricting foods in your diet. If you can relate, today’s post is for you.

Today I want to open up a conversation about a topic that I believe is very important. We live in a world where it is so easy to become obsessive or hyper-vigilant about what we eat. If you are like many people, there can be a constant mental battle between what is clean vs. dirty, toxic vs. non-toxic, healthy vs. unhealthy, good vs. bad. Everywhere we look there are tips, recommendations, diets, foods to eat and avoid, things to do and things not to do.

On my journey to become a holistic nutritionist I tried almost every diet that is out there to see if it works for me and what it does to my body and to gain information to recommend any diet to future clients.

Anyone can develop a skewed relationship with food. Our culture, family, social circles, beliefs, socio-economic statuses; what we see on social media, in books or magazines, at the grocery store, at the gym, in clothing stores, and even what health professionals say to us can all influence how we feel about food. Not to mention diet culture as a whole inundates us everywhere we go.

As a Certified Holistic Nutritionist, I’m familiar with the in’s and out’s of the wellness industry. Are there advantages to all the talk about ways to improve our health? Of course. But is there a dark side? A side that can fuel fear, guilt, shame, comparison, and distrust with our body and choices? Yes.

I don’t think the issue is that we don’t know enough about making healthy choices. I believe that we know too much. And it’s this over-saturation of health information that can lead us astray.

The question is: how do we find that fine balance of caring about our health while not getting caught up in obsession, perfection, or fear? How and where do we draw that line?

Today I want to share with you 5 ways that you can begin creating a healthier relationship with food. These are things that I’ve worked on myself. But please know that this is a process, and sometimes a long one. It takes a lot of practice and having compassion for yourself. Re-framing your mindset, learning to trust yourself again, and undoing years of dieting beliefs and behaviours that have dictated your thoughts, emotions, and actions around food takes time. And sometimes, working with a professional is a necessary step. All of this is okay — it’s all part of the journey.

WHAT A HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP WITH FOOD MIGHT LOOK LIKE

• Honouring your body by eating when hungry and until comfortably full
• Taking the time to sit down and be mindful with meals
• Not feeling guilt, shame, or regret about food choices
• Recognizing which foods make you feel your best (e.g. protein, fat, complex carbs) and enjoying them with meals and snacks
• Allowing all foods to have a place in your diet

WHAT AN UNHEALTHY RELATIONSHIP WITH FOOD MIGHT LOOK LIKE:

• Cutting out food groups because you fear they’re unhealthy
• Having a good vs. bad or clean vs. dirty mindset around food
• Feeling guilty, shameful, or obsessive over food choices
• Planning to start fresh tomorrow
• Skipping a meal because you “ate too much” or as a means to lose weight
• Seeing food as calories or points to count

HOW TO CREATE A HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP WITH FOOD

The points I’ll be sharing with you today are just starting points; a way for you to begin cultivating a healthier relationship with food. I recommend grabbing a journal or notebook and writing your thoughts out as you go along. This is a great way to dig deep and reflect on where you’re at and where you’d like to be.

1. Identify Your Thoughts & Emotions Around Food

A great place to start is simply bringing awareness to the thoughts that you have or stories you tell yourself about food. Do you have pleasant thoughts? Do you celebrate food, or do you fear it most of the time? Do you see it as a source of nourishment and enjoyment or a way to punish yourself for not living up to a certain standard? Do you feel guilty for eating — or not eating — a certain way?

Ask yourself where these thoughts and feelings are coming from. We can develop thoughts, emotions, and beliefs about food from several places. Things we see, hear about, learn about, how we grew up, or people we spend time with, to name a few.

2. Envision Your Healthy Relationship with Food

Take a few moments to determine how you want to feel about food and your food choices. For example, you may want to feel a sense of flexibility with your choices and not be fearful. Or you may want to get out of a restrictive/binging cycle. Be specific and honest here. Journal it out. Envision it.

Then ask yourself what blocks are in your way to have that healthy relationship. Is it that you feel stressed around mealtime? Or that you don’t take the time to sit down and tune in? Is it that you skip meals and find yourself ravenous later on? Or perhaps there’s a fear blocking your way, such as a fear of losing control around food, gaining weight, or becoming unhealthy if you don’t stick to the rules you’re currently following.

Again, write this out. Get quiet and honest with yourself. What is your intuition telling you here? What’s getting in your way of creating that healthy relationship with food that you desire?

Once you’ve identified some blocks, brainstorm some action steps you can take to start supporting your relationship with food. Trust that you have the answers here!

3. Tune in to Your Individual Needs

We all have food rules we follow whether we realize it or not. For example, gluten is bad, meat is bad, dairy is unhealthy, I can’t eat sugar, I shouldn’t eat past 6 pm, or I should only have [insert grams] of carbs per day. The rules we set for ourselves aren’t necessarily always bad. What matters is that we tune into them and determine if they’re truly right for us or not.

Start by making a list of them all. If you think about them, you might realize you have some that you weren’t even aware of before. Then, ask yourself why you follow them and where they came from. Was it a recommendation from years ago? Something your friend told you, saw on social media, or something you read about?

It’s great to have general guidelines about what’s healthy. For example, eating lots of whole vegetables and fruits, whole grains, protein, and drinking lots of water or herbal teas. But it’s easy to get stuck in the rigidity of following specific plans or some idolized way of eating without actually asking ourselves what works best for us. This goes for any type of diet, whether for weight loss, or others like vegan, paleo, or keto.

So now is your chance to tune in to your individual needs. Take a moment to ask yourself, either now or at the start of your day, how you want to feel, what your health vision is, and one action step you can take today to make that happen. For example, you. may be used to following a plan where every morning you have a protein shake or you can’t eat until noon, but what if that’s not working for you today, or this week, or at all? What are YOUR needs?

4. Give Yourself Permission to Eat All Foods

One of the principles of intuitive eating from the book Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch (great book!) is to let go of the diet mentality. The voice that tells you you need to eat a certain way, a certain amount, or you need to restrict certain foods.

Of course, there are times when medical conditions, such as allergy, warrant a food restriction. Let me make this clear: giving yourself “permission to eat all foods” does not translate to throwing everything you know about health out the window and gorging on potato chips for every meal. Quite the contrary. The freedom that comes with allowing all foods to have a place in your diet makes healthy eating easier.

Studies demonstrate that food restrictions make us desire them more. It gives them power over us, and have been shown to actually lead to MORE unhealthy behaviours like binging or overeating. Allowing foods you’ve previously restricted to exist again may mean you will eat a lot of them temporarily, but eventually, all foods become neutral. Those “bad” foods we avoided begin to lose their novelty and thrill, and we stop desiring them so much.

Yes, some foods are more nutritious than others, and it’s okay to care about and prioritize our health. But food is about more than just strictly nutrition alone. It’s about connection, culture, and pleasure, too. Remember also that we can’t eat perfectly all of the time, nor do we need to. Trust that your body can, does, and will desire wholesome, nourishing, nutrient-dense foods and has the innate ability to communicate to you that it doesn’t want chocolate cake all of the time, without you having to force it or muster willpower.

5. Honour Your Hunger

We are born with an innate ability to eat intuitively. Our bodies are hardwired to send us cues and signals all the time about what we need. It tells us when we are hungry when we are full, if a certain type of food looks desirable or if it doesn’t. But when we suppress our needs instead of honouring them – maybe we skip meals, we go too long without eating, or we eat less even when we are still hungry – we set ourselves up for feeling famished and experiencing uncontrollable eating behaviours that make us feel bad and as though we can’t trust ourselves. Consequently, we convince ourselves that we need to follow a specific diet or restrict foods because clearly if we don’t, we just eat everything in sight.

I have experienced this in my own life, and I am sure you have too. If I have days where I don’t eat enough breakfast or I wait too long before eating lunch (completely ignoring my hunger cues), I crave sugar, salt, or other decadent, convenient foods like crazy. To the point where I don’t have the mental or physical energy to make a nourishing meal. But when we honour our hunger and eat when we feel the gentle signal, we are much more likely to make sensible choices that fuel our body properly and in a way that feels good.

We can begin to listen to our bodies signals better by asking ourselves:

• Am I in the mood for this slice of cake? Would it bring me enjoyment and pleasure?
• Am I actually not interested in this right now?
• Am I hungry right now? Or, how am I feeling during this meal? Am I starting to feel comfortably full?
• Do I have a ravenous appetite because I haven’t eaten enough today?

Developing this awareness takes time and practice. I highly recommend the book Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch to learn more about this and other principles of intuitive eating.

As you can see, there is a lot of unpacking that goes into creating a healthy relationship with food. It takes time and it can be a long process of tuning in, getting honest with ourselves, and honouring our needs while letting go of what doesn’t serve us. Know that it is okay to want a healthier relationship with food but being not quite there yet. It is also okay to have days where you feel good about the steps you are taking, and other days where you experience setbacks. It is all part of the process. Healing of any kind, including our relationship with food, is not linear.

I hope this was a helpful starting point for you. Remember that you can always seek professional help if you need assistance and support in this area. You deserve a healthy, enjoyable, positive relationship with food.

Be happy. Be healthy.

I hate self-checkout lanes at stores. I don’t like the notion to replace humans with machines. I like the social contact and the small talk at the register. But then the other day I only had three items, the line at the register was really long, so I thought, “Let’s take the self-checkout machine!” And for some reason, the Self-Checkout-machine started talking to me. I was also tired – long 8-hour-day+ at work.

Self-Checkout machine:

Hey, you. I am the self-checkout machine at Billa. Have to be honest here. It feels like you haven’t been yourself lately. Are you tired? You have placed an unscanned item in your bag. You cannot do that.

Beep: Please remove all unscanned items.

I know you hate me. I know you have been complaining to your friends about me. Don’t even try to deny it.

You whine and moan about how difficult I am, about how much of a hassle I am to you. AND that I take away one person’s job. But I remove the stress of the small talk you would have to make with an in-person attendant.

It is because I am faster if you know what you are doing. It’s not like I am infinitely more convenient. I mean, let’s face it: I am like the worst self-checkout machine ever. If you really feel like our relationship is toxic, then leave. Go checkout with the in-store attendant. Good luck with all that small talk. Just don’t come crawling back to me when they give you that disapproving stare after you inevitably say that no, you actually don’t want to help put an end to childhood cancer today. Yeah, keep the 25 cents. You deserve it.

You should just consider yourself lucky that I am not like the Hofer self-checkouts with the screen that shows you check out and make you look like a damp gummy worm. I would never try to hurt you like that.

Beep: Please remove all unscanned items from the bagging area.

Stop looking at me all accusatory. Don’t you know how that makes me feel? I am not the one blatantly trying to shoplift in the afternoon after your long day at work. I am not invalidating your emotions; I am an insentient machine.

Frankly, I feel it is time someone told it to you straight. You are bumming everyone out. You walk in here trying to look all windswept and carefree like it was a last-minute decision to pop into this Billa and not your regular Denns trip. Seriously, do you think Billa is an organic store? They mainly just sell single, dented cans of Diet Coke and overpriced old sushi. You need to stop buying sushi from here. Seriously, stop. You are the only one who buys those. Before you started shopping here, we hadn’t had to restock sushi bento boxes since 2018. Now they are literally one of the best sellers. It is depressing.

Beep: Beyond that, you have changed.

The only reason you first started coming here was because of me. The local Spar down the street doesn’t have self-checkout, and if you were even momentarily considering frequenting Hofer on the corner, the aforementioned demented surveillance monitors quickly eliminated it from the equation. Don’t you see? It was me all along. Muahahaha! And now you have the audacity to act as if I am the one inconveniencing you and not the other way around.

Beep: Please remove the unscanned item from the bagging area.

Did you consider, for even a moment, before stewing in your own misplaced overall anger about so many things such as Covid, masks, 2G, 2G+, Flurona, DeltaCron and whatever they come up with next, that this is how I express my love? That maybe I just wanted you to linger at my side, if only for a moment longer? I love you. What we have is raw. It is real. I see you, the most intimate parts of you. The parts that you try so hard to keep shielded from the world. Is it a shame that keeps you hidden? Or is it the fear that someone like me will come along and see straight through your facade, straight to your core? The sole witness to all of your flaws and insecurities and things you wished you said to your mother – and love you anyway? You know these are all information I retrieve from your banking card?

I know you. So go. You’ll come back. When the world’s judgment becomes too much, you know I’ll be here unblinking, unflinching, unperturbed — offering you the quiet acceptance of even the most grotesque parts of you and a paper receipt, even though you chose the emailed one. Because I’m not perfect either. The future will look like this. Humans will be replaced by machines. Soon….. muahahhahahaha

Beep: Please remove the unscanned item from the bagging area.

Me: WHY? I ONLY WANTED TO CHECK OUT THREE ITEMS? WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THIS WORLD? EVERYTHING AND EVERYBODY SEEMS TO BE INSANE AND RIDICULOUS!

Because you can’t scan unconditional love. We don’t sell that here. But I’ll see you the next time you need to buy a family-sized bag of Gummibears, amounts of almond milk you claim to use for “cereal,” organic laundry detergent, and a Raw Chocolate bar because you are soooooo hungry.

Beep: Please remove all unscanned items.

Please remember to take your ridiculously short receipt.

Beep: Please don’t go. Please don’t leave me and go to a check-out attendant. I know I suck but this will be the future. Ha. I win, you lose.