Guzzle cold brew or sip matcha. Sleep in or sweat before dawn. Stay full bush or go bare down there. Every day you make a bunch of choices, but one action should be a given: eating what you want and feeling great about it. Or at least, that’s the premise behind #foodfreedom, the movement that’s taking over Instagram with more than 173,000 posts and giving diet culture the left swipe.
Rachel Turner, certified personal trainer and founder of life-coaching platform Strong Chicks Rock, coined the term “food freedom” (not to be confused with its use in relation to the Whole30 diet plan) to help her followers build a healthy relationship with the very stuff that nourishes them. “Food freedom is learning to untangle your worth from what you’re eating. It’s about about saying ‘yes’ to the foods that you want to eat without feeling guilty. It’s about saying ‘no’ to the foods you don’t like, even if someone once told you they were healthy.”
While it’s great that the world has taken steps toward increased body positivity and acceptance, “being body-positive doesn’t mean that you have a healthy relationship with food,” says Turner. This is why she and other wellness influencers are spreading the message that it’s time for all of us to stop relating our food choices with our sense of self-worth.
Health coach Mik Zazon is urging her followers to restrict the mind-set that “cutting out certain foods is the path to a better and happier life…or that there’s good foods and bad foods.” Basically, give your negative internal dialogue a Marie Kondo, joy-sparking makeover and embrace intuitive eating.
To follow the guiding principles of #foodfreedom, first break up with dieting (Zazon and Turner believe diet dos and don’ts can spiral into disordered eating). Second, eat the delicious food your body your body wants and needs in order to feel good.
If that sounds a little abstract to you, Turner offers a suggestion: “If you’re craving chocolate, go ahead and eat a serving of chocolate. Because if you eat a yogurt when what you really want is a Reese’s cup, you’re probably going to end up eating both, which would make you feel worse than if you just ate the chocolate.” The most important question regarding your food choices, these influencers maintain, isn’t whether something is unhealthy or healthy, or good or bad. Rather, it’s how to make each meal as enjoyable as possible by giving your body (and soul) what it wants.
“I wholeheartedly believe that when you learn how to stop obsessing about food, and finally feel (mostly) normal around it—this freedom spills over into ALL aspects of your life. Find food freedom, find body peace. Find food freedom, find self-worth. Find self-worth, relationships heal. Relationships heal, the way you show up to life changes because you’re not seeking your worth in others,” Turner says.
A movement that’s all about creating feelings of self-worth and freedom? Sounds totally worthy of a double tap.
Happiness and what you eat are definitely linked—science says so. And while we’re talking about Insta-trend, #bloatpositvity and #acnepositvity are also things.
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