Christy Harrison: Make Peace with Food & Your Body – Ep. 134
“Research shows that 65% of American women have disordered eating of some kind and an additional 10% have full blown eating disorders whether or not they’ve been diagnosed or treated. So 75% of American women are thought to have some issue with food that is disordered.” – Christy Harrison of the Food Psych Podcast on why we need to make peace with food and your body
Check Out Our Batch Cooking Show!
Each Saturday at 2pm PST you can join us for our batch cooking show! Last week we made chicken salad, chicken bone broth, and two different kinds of roasted almonds: spicy roasted and chile lime roasted almonds. These two dishes and 1 snack all in just 35 minutes!
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Why batch cooking? It’s a great way to prepare for the week by making nutritious, delicious meals in advance. In fact, this food should last you around 3-4 days!
Make Peace With Food & Your Body
“It’s okay that it’s not working for you. It’s okay that it’s taking you a lot of tries to get to this because nobody gets it out of the gate. Nobody does.” – Rob Dionne on why it’s okay that it takes you awhile to get healthy again or to find the right nutrition for your body.
There’s a lot of social pressure that makes us feel like we have to look a certain way or a be a certain size to be accepted by others. Fortunately, there are amazing people like Christy Harrison of the Food Psych Podcast who are saying that “No, health is not a size,” and they’re teaching us how we can love our bodies and make peace with food.
Like Christy’s personal story, it can be a long, difficult journey to accepting yourself and healing your relationship with food, but you should never give up. There’s always time and awesome sources out there to help you on your health and wellness journey.
Intuitive Eating vs Traditional “Diets”
“Diets don’t take into account how hungry you are, how energized you are between meals, or what foods you crave. If you demonize or restrict a certain type of food, that becomes all you ever want to eat.” – Christy Harrison on restrictive dieting.
As we talked about on the last podcast, Should I Count Calories?, low-calorie diets have a 95% fail rate! A lot of these trendy diets are driven by fear and they tell you to go cold turkey and cut out certain foods such as gluten, carbs, or sugar. However, it’s impossible to live on such a restricted diet.
“The science behind restrictive diets doesn’t hold up over time. What does hold up is variety, moderation, and balance.” – Christy Harrison
Unlike traditional, harsh diets, intuitive eating focuses on thinking about eating a balanced meal and selecting the types of foods to eat that make you feel good about yourself.
By following such a restricted diet of no carbs or breads, Christy found herself experiencing a cycle of binge eating those foods, body shaming herself, and then working out in excessive amounts to try to make up for it. If you’re thinking to yourself right now, “I do that too,” don’t be too hard on yourself. It’s never too late to make peace with food and your body.
“It can be easy to become obsessed with counting calories, restricting what food we eat, or working out for such an amount of time that we become obsessed with it.” – Rob Dionne
Strategies to Make Peace with Food & Your Body
“Intuitive nutrition helps you relate to food and relate to your body again. It’s really important to reconnect with your body so that you do it from a place of self-care rather than self-control and controlling your body.” – Christy Harrison
It can take years of therapy to become more self-caring towards food and our bodies. To help us get there, we need to be more compassionate and kind towards ourselves. Christy’s advice is that we should think about treating ourselves like we would treat a friend.
For example, if you want a snack, allow yourself to have that healthy snack rather than restricting yourself. Don’t limit yourself from waiting for a certain amount of time to eat it or avoid eating it at all. Self-care is understanding when your body is hungry for nutrition and then providing it with the foods that you want.
How to Set Yourself Up for Intuitive Eating
To make peace with your food & body, Christy suggests two main steps:
- Reject the diet mentality
- Honor your hunger
When you reject the diet mentality, you’re not limiting yourself of food nor are you relying on the next diet to be your magic pill. Once again, these trendy diets only have a 5% success rate and they’re not created to fit every person’s nutrition needs.
You can honor your hunger by ensuring that you’re trying to provide your body with nutrition whenever it’s hungry. It’s very normal to start to feel hungry again within 3-4 hours of eating a meal because our blood sugar is low.
Having a healthy snack will keep your stomach satisfied, your head clear, and your body in motion.
Understand Your Body & Make Peace Today
Christy provides a quiz on her website to help you assess your relationship with food. It’s not a formal diagnosis, but it can help you to better understand your relationship with food and if you should seek other sources to help you get healthy again.
Christy also has a closed Facebook group, Food Psych Podcast Listener Crew. It’s a great place to be with people who feel the same way that you do about health, nutrition, and positive body image.
About Christy Harrison
Christy Harrison, MPH, RD, CDN is a registered dietitian nutritionist and certified intuitive eating counselor based in Brooklyn, NY. She offers online intuitive eating courses and individual nutrition therapy to help people make peace with food and their bodies.
Since 2013 Christy has hosted Food Psych, a podcast exploring people’s relationships with food and paths to body positivity. It is now #1 on the U.S. iTunes charts for intuitive eating and Health at Every Size, and is one of the top 100 podcasts in the Health category.
Christy began her career as a journalist in 2003, and has written for and edited major publications including Gourmet, The Food Network, Refinery29, Slate, BuzzFeed, Modernist Cuisine, AllRecipes, and many others. As an expert on nutrition and people’s relationships with food, she has been quoted in top media outlets including Refinery29, Health, Men’s Fitness, Bon Appetit, The Observer, and more.
Check out Christy’s work at christyharrison.com, and take her quiz for a free checkup of your relationship with food.
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What You’ll Hear on This Episode
00:00 Open Sky Fitness Introduction
1:15 Opening comments with Rob and Devon
3:00 Batch cooking is awesome! Here’s why!
9:00 Introduction to Christy Harrison
9:50 Christy’s relationship with food while growing up
14:00 How Christy became interested in becoming a registered dietitian.
16:50 Christy’s struggle with food and her eating disorder during college and as a food journalist.
20:00 How to make peace with your body and food
22:15 What does it mean to be a registered dietitian and how does that influence your intuitive eating.
26:00 Do dietitians learn how to build relationships or is the education more focused on science and clinicals?
29:25 Is there a gap between the medical world and the new world of nutrition: intuitive, holistic, whole food eating?
33:00 What are strategies we can use to be more self-caring towards food.
34:30 How to Set Yourself Up for Intuitive Eating
41:45 Christy’s journey to getting healthy
43:20 What did you do early on to help your nutrition, but realized later that it was a waste of time?
1:01:15 What are the first steps to get started with making peace with food and your body?
1:03:00 How to get in touch with Christy
1:04:20 Closing comments with Rob and Devon
1:06:15 Open Sky Fitness Closing
RESOURCES MENTIONED DURING THE SHOW:
- Join The Open Sky Fitness Podcast Group on Facebook
- Check out Christy Harrison’s Official Website
- Listen to the Food Psych Podcast
- Team up with Christy and take her intuitive eating fundamentals course
- Join Christy’s Food Psych Podcast Listener Crew on Facebook
- Read Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch
- Tune into the OSF episode 133- Should I Count Calories?
- Find out about healthy foods with OSF episode 102- Julie Daniluk: The Power of Anti-Inflammatory Foods
- Discover The Problem with the Dogmatic Nutrition Approach OSF episode 124
- Learn more about calories and healthy eating with OSF episode 123- Hot Topics: Gluten & Sugar
- Step up your cooking game with OSF episode 119- Convenient Foods and Meal Prep Hacks
- Get organized with the OSF episode 117- Kitchen Clean Out Hacks
- Change your ways with OSF episode 115- 5 Steps to Planning a Healthy Life
- Want learn the healthy way to add calories? Find out How To Gain Weight Fast with the OSF Episode 90
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Thanks for listening/reading Episode 134- Christy Harrison: Make Peace With Food & Your Body! We hope you have gained more knowledge on how to be a healthier you!
