What is Holistic Nutrition?
What we eat does not exist in a bubble. What we feel does not exist in a bubble. What we feel, hear, experience and eat all have an impact on our overall wellbeing and are intricately intertwined. Holistic nutrition is our sleep, exercise, hydration, spirituality, nutrition, our connectedness to others and sense of community, how our food is grown, processed and prepared. The impact of stress, acute and chronic, affects every single system within our body and upsets the delicate interconnection of processes that happens every day to keep our body in a state of homeostasis (balance) and keep us feeling our best.
Good nutrition is not just about the foods we eat; it’s also the relationship that we have with food, our bodies and what we put in them. It is physical health, sleep, mindset & mental health, lifestyle choices, relationships, our connection to the earth and our spirituality (faith, religion or otherwise). All these things come together in a vast array of interconnected relationships within the body. If even one of those is tipped out of balance, we can feel the effects of that imbalance across many areas.
Holistic nutrition is learning to connect ALL the dots, keeping perspective of the big picture but also learning to tune in at the most basic level. The human body is smart and gives us clues as to what it needs. Together with a series of questionnaires we can tune-in to the root of what your body is telling you and offer it what it needs. All that is needed is openness to a shift in perspective, the courage to try something new and being open to questioning what you thought you already knew.
Holistic nutrition is about meeting you where you are and helping you find new ways. It’s not a “program” or a “plan” or a “diet”. It’s not rigid, perfect, or exclusive. It is curious, flexible, and collaborative. It looks different for everyone because we are all biologically unique.
There is wellness within all of us … let’s find YOUR wellness within!
Shame Free Nutrition
Much like our bodies, food has A LOT of emotion associated with it. I grew up as a teenage girl in the 90’s, raised in the grip of our “new” diet culture and Standard American Diet propaganda. Low fat, fat free, no sugar (a.k.a. artificially sweetened), diet this, low calorie or lite that. And diet after diet promising “results”. The results most of them promised was to be smaller, less fat, and to do it as quickly as possible. SlimFast, Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, Atkins, Paleo, Keto . . . I know I’ve missed a few, but you get the point! Until I set out to find a new path in life, this and the Canada Food Guide were the source of most of my wellness and “nutrition” knowledge.
FULL
I’ve been working hard on my own food demons alongside my nutrition education and have come up with some key guiding principles for this community:
First & foremost … NO SHAME!!
"We do the best we can until we know better. Then when you know better, do better."
This famous quote by Maya Angelou has become the guiding principle of my life. If we can learn to give ourselves grace, there is less room for shame and without shame, everything feels a little less heavy and more manageable. In this space, there is no judgment of foods as good or bad, allowed or not allowed. There are no absolutes (e.g. NEVER eat or SHOULD eat). I view food from a good, better, best perspective and recognize the other spaces that food holds outside of nourishment. I am not here to judge you.
Food is food. Some foods give our bodies the things it needs to carry out all our necessary body functions. We call these Super Foods (a.k.a. whole, unprocessed foods). Some foods serve very little nutritional benefit to the body but bring us joy for many different reasons. We call these Sometimes Foods. We need both kinds of food to be healthy and happy. It all comes down to balance – I like to focus on eating 80% for nutrition and 20% for my soul. I’m not here to judge what you eat.
Every human body is different. We are biologically unique. We have different needs, tastes, preferences, emotional attachments etc. What works for one person may not for another. The human body carries out hundreds of thousands of essential functions everyday. It is smart and gives us clues as to what is happening. The key is to learn how to listen to it and interpret its clues. Those clues allow us to choose foods that support our body in the best way possible to establish and maintain equilibrium. This is my superpower.
My goal in this community is to help you question some of the paradigms that may be the only thing we’ve ever known. To be a safe and judgment free space. To be curious, to learn to listen to your body. To understand that sometimes it’s not always about a food, but what we associate with it. And to be open to perspective shifts. Some of our judgments around food and our bodies are so deeply ingrained it’s like an autopilot – we don’t even realize they are there. Most of all my goal is to help you learn grace for yourself and learn to trust and honour your body, mind and spirit. When we do that, the choices that we make will naturally shift. When they do, the clues that our body gives us will shift as we address imbalances. Each day, we have the opportunity to make new and different choices. That my friends is a gift like no other.
Yours in Health,
Andrea
(formerly known as Andi Sauce) … that’s a story for another day