I had no idea how to write this post. That’s why I’ve been stalling on it.
I have four topics left in my ten-part series on the most significant changes I’ve made to become the happiest, most connected and authentic version of myself this year.
The first six were easy writes. I’ve shared about water, personal care products, fasting, sleep, movement, and personal development.
The last three I plan to write will be easy peasy because they collectively constitute my three main daily practices.
This one, though, is my big, hard, scary one to tackle because it’s highly personal, highly triggering, and very confronting to talk about.
Today, I want to talk about food.
I have battled with food anxiety and borderline eating disorders for most of my life. From restrictive dieting to all-or-nothing eating to every shade of emotional eating, I’ve been through it.
I’ve had to do a lot of work around food, anxiety and self-love to get to the point of being able to look at food as fuel and not a punishment, reward or means to disassociate.
I don’t want to talk about my issues with food today because they’re not what this email is about or even in the spirit of the series. I only raise it because I strongly encourage you to do the work you need to do around your own food ‘stuff’ if it’s an issue. I’m not presuming. Many of you likely have a really good relationship with food.
A good relationship with food can help you consider food as fuel and make the most of what I’m going to share today. I’m talking about nutrition.
Food is, simply put, the fuel that keeps our body operating. Through a series of ingenuous, autonomous responses, our digestive system takes food and turns it into the building blocks that our cells need to stay alive.
But there is a vast, gaping chasm between being alive and healthy and alive and unhealthy. It astounds me regularly to witness the difference in my body, nervous system, and energy now that I am eating intuitively, eating for health, and eating to love myself.
Much of what you read in this email may be triggering. You might disagree with many of my points. You will have your own beliefs about food, and trust me; food beliefs are personal and hard to shake.
I’ve done my research and reading, but for every book I read that confirms my beliefs, there’s a book that confirms a conflicting belief. Simply put, science can prove anything “right” with enough money and incentive.
So rest assured, my most powerful discoveries about food have come about through personal experimentation, NOT from listening to so-called ‘experts’.
My advice after this is not to “go out and follow my dietary advice” but rather to “go out and experiment and try things and figure out what works for YOUR unique system.”
Let’s backtrack a fair way.
Growing up, I had a mother who was very curious about diet. She certainly went on diets. I remember the Atkin’s diet quite vividly because it involved a lot of bacon.
But Mum settled into eating and feeding her family as per the Australian dietary guidelines. We ate a lot of carbohydrates—bread, cereal, and starchy vegetables. We were given milk. We switched to vile “Nuttelex” (hydrogenated margarine-type spread) to reduce our fats and mostly ate a low-fat diet. Thankfully, we didn’t eat much processed food, and there was a lot less around back then. And sugar was on the table, albeit usually mum did her own baking.
I put on a lot of weight when I left home at age 19. I attribute that weight gain to having food freedom and going a bit too hard on junk food for the first time in my life.
I continued to gain weight and feel hungry for a couple of years until my partner at the time developed an interest in human performance and purchased an obscure diet paradigm called “The Spartan Regime” from the internet.
(I’m talking about the early days of the internet, too. I’m talking about using an Internet cafe and waiting ten minutes for a website to load. I still don’t know how he managed the feat of finding and purchasing this manual. He doesn’t even use Facebook to this day.)
I digress. An appropriate amount of time passed, and sure enough, a big folder of hand-printed pages arrived in the mail, and the Spartan regime was upon us.
I’d never read anything like it. It encouraged a kind of caveman-style approach to eating: unlimited amounts of fruit and vegetables, undercooked animal products, raw goat milk, everything as close to nature as possible, nothing processed, minimal grains, and no processed sugar at all. It was restrictive, but the payoff promised was enticing, so I decided to try it.
I went from barely having enough energy to walk my dog to running 6km a day in the tropical heat and bursting out of my skin with energy. I also lost 30kg in a matter of weeks. It was outrageous.
The only problem? When I followed this method, I found that I had zero control over ‘regular’ food. If I ate a sliver of birthday cake, it would spark days of binge-eating sugar. The diet gave my body energy and vitality, but it wasn’t practical for the real world. And I didn’t want to fathom a life without cake.
I gave up the Spartan Regime but maintained a strong interest in food and diet.
Several years later, I was working as the head chef in a fabulous restaurant, and every afternoon, I would start work, break my fast from the day before, and eat whatever I pleased.
I ate an unlimited amount of hugely calorific food and whatever I was craving, but I only ate that one time a day. It was weird, and I didn’t know what I was doing. But you know what? It worked. I was never hungry, and I never craved anything because I satisfied my cravings.
I soon returned to “normal” people eating because I was ashamed of how I ate. I’ve always naturally desired large meals less often. I’m rarely hungry in the morning, seldom hungry at night, and usually very hungry in the early afternoon. And yet, I’ve eaten meals at “meal times” for most of my life because that’s what people do.
A few years later, when I started a new job, I was at the peak of my fitness journey and the strongest and fittest I’d ever been.
I was feeling so fantastic that I decided to splurge on seeing a dietitian for the first time in my life and have them create a meal plan for me based on my unique circumstances, exercise regime, and body type.
That fucking diet. I spent a small fortune (on a chef’s salary) for a low-fat, high-carb, calorie-restrictive diet that made me more hungry and depressed than I’ve ever been in my life. I was STARVING.
Each day’s breakfast consisted of two Weet-Bix with a drizzle of honey and a cup of skim milk. Can you imagine? I was used to eating quadruple that amount of calories when I broke my fast, more even.
I ditched that plan and spent the next 15 years eating whatever I wanted, but with the food anxiety at play and the odd crash diet. (Like when I lost 10kg in a few weeks before attending Hamilton Islands’ first-ever international instameet).
Gratuitous shot of me looking fabulous on Hamilton Island.
My weight went up and down, but mostly up. Discovering intermittent fasting helped a lot. It allowed me to finally eat in a way that felt more natural to me, but with two kids and finally doing a deep dive into my food issues with a psychologist, I was still pretty disconnected from eating intuitively.
Until 2023.
After doing the Spiral and offloading a heap of emotional baggage, I made a pact to do everything I could in 2024 to be IN MY BODY. That means literally having energy and connection in my body. I do this in a number of different ways, such as Breathwork, yoga, cold water, etc., but the interesting side effect of being in my body is that my body now speaks to me in a language I can hear.
And it often tells me what to eat.
I’ve found intuitive eating frustrating on many levels. It’s inconvenient. It can be wasteful. Inconvenient eating means I meal plan for the week and then feel like none of it and need to go to the shops to buy the obscure ingredients required to cook what I really want.
Intuitive eating means I can have a fridge loaded with leftovers, but I need to prepare a salad I ate ten years ago with a dozen ingredients not currently in the house.
That might sound impossible to you. Remember that I’ve had a year of indulging my curiosity and have deliberately created space in my life for these ‘experiments’.
Through this experimentation, I’ve learned a lot. But the biggest lesson I want to share with you is this –
When you listen to your body, it will keep talking to you.
Every single time we listen, our intuition gets louder. And I’m not just talking about food preferences. I’m talking about that deep inner knowing that tells you exactly what path you’re meant to be on.
That went deep for a second. Let’s get back to food …
There are two main types of hunger – physiological and psychological.
Physiological hunger (or physical hunger) is a mild, pleasant build-up of hunger that, when met intuitively, results in greater satisfaction and much more extended periods before you get hungry again.
Psychological hunger (or emotional hunger) can come on suddenly and often urgently. It is linked to our emotional connection to food rather than our physical need for it.
Distinguishing between the two is a great place to start if you’ve never paid attention to your hunger. A craving for a piece of cake in the afternoon is likely psychological/ emotional hunger.
When I eat according to my physiological hunger cues, I rarely overeat. On the contrary, it’s more common for me to eat once or twice a day these days. My hunger builds gradually, and I have ample time to indulge it—even if it necessitates a random trip to the shops.
Interestingly, and to add another layer to the story, highly processed food messes with your hunger cues. There are literally ingredients in our food that disrupt the hormonal dance in our body.
There are also foods that harm our bodies, addict our bodies and disconnect us from ourselves.
So, although I don’t have ‘food rules’ per se, I do mostly abstain from the following:
- I rarely eat packaged, processed food. This year, I did a big pantry clean out and ditched almost everything packaged. I’m talking about instant noodles, biscuits, crackers, convenience food, chips, etc. Anything that contained ingredients I couldn’t identify, such as preservatives, seed oils (any vegetable oil), or weird sugar/ salt ratios, left the house.
I still buy some packaged foods for convenience – like spaghetti – but I buy mostly organic with a handful of good, recognisable ingredients.
I don’t eat takeaway food anymore. It’s trash food. Maybe I’ll get a veggie burger once a year, and twice or thrice, I’ll eat hot chips. I don’t consider it food anymore. I don’t consider it love or treating myself. It’s poison. If I eat it, I’m either very hungry with no other option, or I’m going through some emotional shit and haven’t ‘checked’ myself.
I’ve found a few “junk” foods that are less bad than the originals and keep them in the cupboard as a treat. I buy potato crisps cooked in avocado oil and might eat a packet every few months. The crackers I buy for my cheese are one of several brands that contain no seed oils. I still buy chocolate—but dark, organic, and usually with only three or four ingredients.
Read ‘Ultra-processed People‘ by Chris van Tulleken to learn more.
- Speaking of seed oils, I got rid of all of them and anything containing them from the house. This is basically everything you buy from the shops. You might have heard the term’ seed oil’ and wondered what it means and why it’s so bad. Seed oils are any vegetable oil—sunflower, canola, corn, grape seed, soybean, palm oil, or generic ‘vegetable oil’.
What makes them so bad? Simply put, they cause inflammation in your body. Inflammation keeps your body’s immune system constantly working and steals your energy and life force. The science coming out is startling. Read ‘Dark Calories‘ by Catherine Shanahan to educate yourself more.
The process these plants go through to make the oil you buy at the shops is startling. These oils are not food. Steer clear.
I cook with unrefined extra virgin olive oil, unrefined extra virgin avocado oil, ghee, butter and unrefined/ raw coconut oil. Almost every ingredient you buy at a supermarket will have employed underhand tactics to mislead you about the health of their product. I research all the fats I buy now and usually get them at specialty or organic stores. My butter and ghee are grass-fed/ organic. I typically buy once a month when my organic store has a member’s day, and food is 15% off.
- I try to steer clear of refined sugar. I’ve grappled with this for a long time. And to be clear, I don’t NOT eat sugar. Here’s my issue with sugar – it’s very addictive. Anything addictive like that is messing with my body’s cues and cutting me off from my intuition.
Our bodies are designed to crave sweet foods. It’s an old caveman characteristic. This drove our ancestors to eat vast quantities of fruit when it was in season, bulking up their fat stores and ensuring their survival.
But the sweet foods we have access to are insane, and sugar is in everything. Here’s what I do now.
I satisfy my sweet cravings with honey in my cacao and organic maple syrup in my chia pudding. I also eat small amounts of fruit when I crave it—only several times a week.
And making cacao each day has become a sacred and pleasurable ritual.
I eat good quality dark chocolate several days a week.
I bake when I feel like something very indulgent and use the best organic ingredients.
Like that time I made a $100 organic strawberry pie. lol
And occasionally, I’ll indulge in ’emotional’ eating for a birthday and eat a piece of mainstream cake.
- I don’t eat generically, mass-farmed animal products.
I’m a vegetarian, so I don’t eat meat, but I do eat dairy and eggs. You are what you eat, yes. But you also eat what the thing you eat eats.
If you’re buying milk from a major supermarket, you’re consuming what that cow ate. And do you know what commercially farmed dairy cows eat? Often the by-products of the seed oil industry. They’re even eating palm from the palm oil industry. They eat shit. Food that cows are not meant to eat and mixed in with a healthy dose of antibiotics that destroy your gut microbiome!
It’s unhealthy. It’s unethical. It’s making you sick.
Read ‘Gut‘ by Giulia Enders to learn more about the wonderful world of the gut and your microbiome. You might do your best to avoid antibiotics because you know how it destroys your gut microbiome, but then you eat generic dairy or supermarket meat. You’re consuming the antibiotics those animals consumed.
I eat grass-fed organic dairy—even my cheeses. I eat pastured, organic, free-range eggs from a known supplier. And when I buy meat for my family, I mostly buy organic, pastured, and free-range.
Yes. It’s damn expensive. And I’m mainly subsisting on government parenting support. I’m not in a high-income bracket. But I value my health above all things. And food is the cornerstone of health—the absolute root of it all. Food is medicine. And you’ll avoid a lot of pharmaceutical medicine down the track if you treat it as such.
- I don’t eat commercially farmed produce. This one has been a very slow and gradual phase, but I eat as much organic and spray-free produce as I can afford.
I will eventually switch to fully organic. I do the best I can on my budget, so this is how I buy produce.
I go to a local farmers market every week. I buy most of my food organic, some spray-free, and the rest from local growers.
A market haul.
Anything I buy that isn’t organic gets soaked in water and bicarbonate soda for ten minutes before being rinsed and eaten. This neutralises and removes pesticide residue.
I used to think that organic food was a waste of money and a bit of a wank, begrudgingly admitting that it might have higher nutrient value than generic produce. These days, I know how harmful pesticides are. You know that they literally spray poison on these crops, right?
- Generally speaking, I don’t eat anything mass-produced or non-organic.
I source the best organic sourdough or spelt sourdough I can find. All my tinned foods are organic and in BPA-free cans (yes, most cans now use hormone-disrupting plastic in their seals). I only use tinned foods when I’m really pressed for time; otherwise, I have a well-stocked pantry of dried organic pulses, grains, and legumes.
I buy raw, ceremonial-grade cacao from a local supplier, raw honey from the markets, raw kombucha from a local producer, and make my own cold-pressed juice. I use flaky, mineral-rich salts and small-batch organic vinegar.
Wow. You know, as I write this, it is becoming clearer to me just how far I’ve come with my diet. It’s funny that I still think of myself as someone who has further to go. I love experimenting with myself and my energy and seeing what makes me feel the best I can.
I thought the above list would seem easy to people reading, but the honest truth is that I’ve completely overhauled the way I eat. This takes a huge investment of time, energy, and money. It’s taken me a year to get my pantry to where I want it and to set up the systems to eat this way.
But the trade-off is that I am alive and thriving. I have energy to burn. I look and feel clean and clear. I’m buzzing. My body speaks to me. I don’t SUFFER. My nervous system is solid.
Have you seen me?
And now that I’m clear on what my food culture is, and my pantry is stocked accordingly, I eat whatever the fuck I want. I don’t count calories, I don’t limit fat, I don’t limit portion sizes.
If I want a one-inch-thick slab of fresh sourdough with a centimetre of cultured butter slathered on top, I eat it and return for seconds.
If I want half a jar of peanut butter on my chia pudding and a generous splash of cream, I have it.
If I’m eating pasta and I want two bowls, I eat them—with a whole tub of freshly grated Parmesan.
I eat like a queen and love myself with good food. In fact, I’ve come to believe that my love of food and my love of myself is the cornerstone of my weight loss. I eat with such joy and pleasure these days.
Three king-size organic, pastured eggs with two slices of grass-fed, organic cheese and three slices of organic spelt sourdough spread with organic, grass-fed butter.
That bullshit we’ve been fed about calories in/ calories out. What do they call it? The calorie deficit to lose weight? I’m here to tell you that it’s a lie. Do you want to know what dictates how much you weigh?
Energetics
Genes
Microbiome
Love yourself. Listen to yourself. Don’t trust food companies. Don’t trust supermarkets. Slowly start to learn, test, explore. Find local suppliers in your area. Make a change a week.
Treat food as sacred medicine. Treat your body like a beautiful temple.
Food is medicine.
WAKE UP AND PAY ATTENTION.
The disconnection we feel from our bodies is drastically exacerbated by the non-food food we eat. It destroys our hormones, our intuition, and our health. It makes us sick. It’s energetically dark and bad.
Be intentional in this one area of your life and see how much changes for you.
I am so passionate about this topic. I thought I didn’t want to preach in this email, but it seems that I do.
There is so much that you don’t know about the food you’re consuming, including terrible colours and flavours and misleading labels.
Did you know that, as per Australian legislation, if a product contains less than 10% sugar, it doesn’t need to be included on the ingredients list? They can literally write “NO SUGAR” on the label and then put 9.99% sugar in the product.
Artificial colours are endocrine-disrupting. They affect the way your body operates.
They affect your emotions.
Preservatives cause cancer.
Animals are kept in inhumane conditions and fed on the by-products of the big food industry. Some grass-fed animals don’t even get to go outside and eat grass; it’s shipped into the sheds.
Know your food. Make choices that are kind to your body, kind to the environment, and kind to the wonderful animals that feed and sustain us.
Bring back your POWER and AUTONOMY through this one practice – loving yourself with food.
Eliminate inflammation in your body and reduce your risk of serious disease.
Don’t support an industry that will deliberately make you sick so that they can achieve higher profits.
And don’t ever, ever rely on your government or industries to do what’s right for you. That is YOUR responsibility.
At best, they are slow-moving and well-intentioned but fallible.
At worst, they have an agenda to keep you slow-witted, slow-moving and reliant on pharmaceuticals.
Either way, it’s your responsibility to take care of yourself and be the best version of yourself. Food is the fuel that you consume to do that.
Read. Test on yourself. Make the time.
There is no better thing to spend your time, money and energy on in this world.
Love Lauren
P.S. If you’ve missed the earlier emails in this series, you can catch up by searching for the subject lines. I’ve so far written about water (“How to Change Your Life), personal care (“Be a sexy, smelly animal”), fasting (“Fasting: Punishment or Reward”), sleep (“Giving myself a fighting chance”), movement (“Oops, I accidentally didn’t exercise for ten years), and personal development (“Put Yourself in Rooms That Will Make You Question Yourselves).\
**Originally published to my email database on the 15th of November, 2024**
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