Have you joined a gym or class but can’t find the motivation to go?  Do you work out regularly for a week or two but can’t seem to keep the momentum?

by Golda Poretsky, H.H.C.
www.bodylovewellness.com

Listen to the podcast of this post here:

I’ve been avoiding this topic for a while now, just because it’s complicated.  In fact, it’s way more complicated than Meryl Streep’s situation in the movie It’s Complicated, and probably more complicated than the television show called Denise Richards: It’s Complicated, though I haven’t seen the latter, so I can’t be sure.

The topic is: how do you handle food allergies when you’re trying to eat intuitively?

A number of you have asked me, and I’m going to try to answer it here.  Though, I must add the disclaimer that what I’m about to say may not be appropriate or right for everyone, and if you’re really struggling with this, I would recommend having a few sessions with me to try to work through it.

I also need to add the disclaimer that intuitive eating is approached with a system of guidelines that can seem deceptively simple, but it can take a while (i.e., weeks, months, or years) to really feel like you’re doing it somewhat correctly.

When you have food allergies and you’re learning to eat intuitively, your food allergy concerns often come into conflict most with the intuitive eating principle of “eat what your body wants.”   The process of getting in touch with your body’s desires in terms of food can be a tricky one, especially if you’re accustomed to being on a diet and making choices based upon your diet’s rules.  Add to that a list of food rules due to allergies, and the whole thing can seem impossible.

So let’s talk first about allergies.  With food allergies, we’re really talking about a range of symptoms — from mild discomfort to possible death.  Since this range is so broad, let’s consider some categories:

• Severe Category — Severe food allergy that can lead to anaphylactic shock or other severe symptoms or exacerbate conditions such as celiac disease.
• Moderate Category — Food allergy that leads to symptoms that can last over a period of days, such as skin rashes or digestive issues.
• Mild Category  — Food allergy that causes temporary discomfort.

Let’s first talk about severe allergies.  If you have severe, life-threatening allergies, then, much like a dieter, you’re going to have to contend with a food or foods that you must avoid no matter what.  And for those of you with these kind of allergies, it may sometimes feel like punishment, even though you know that avoiding those foods isn’t punishment but a necessary component of your good health.  So my main recommendation for these type of allergies is to keep reminding yourself that by avoiding these foods, you’re treating yourself well.  You’re taking care of yourself by not eating peanuts or dairy or whatever foods are most troubling for you.  So if you have a severe gluten allergy but a major part of you is saying, “we want a bagel from the bagel store!” you will have to keep reminding yourself of how much you love to take care of yourself and how avoiding those foods is taking care of yourself.  Also, as much as possible, shift your internal focus toward foods that are non-allergenic for you, and use intuitive eating strategies where you focus on all of the things that you can eat without any issue.  Also, make sure to keep food available for yourself that is appropriate for you.

I say all this, but from my experience, people with severe allergies often are better at avoiding foods that they’re allergic to, mainly because the negative health effects are so  black and white.  When your choices are: don’t eat this and feel okay or eat this and go to the hospital, the choice is often so ingrained that the person barely takes time to think about it.

That being said, the food allergies that I and most of my clients struggle with are generally in the moderate to mild category.  Using myself as an example, I have a mild allergy to a number of fruits, including pineapple, strawberries and cantaloupe.  If I eat these foods, I usually get a sore throat for a few hours and then it just goes away.  In terms of more moderate allergies, I have a sensitivity to wheat, which sometimes seems to not bother me at all and sometimes causes bloating and itchy skin that may stick around for days.  (Charming, right?)  Anyway, those of you with these kind of allergies can relate to the calculus that sometimes goes through my head; i.e., well, if I just have half a bagel and then I don’t eat any more wheat for a few days it’ll probably be okay and maybe one taste of pineapple won’t hurt…  You know, you kind of make deals with yourself about your food allergies.

Last week, I had a really terrible cold.  I kept getting hungry, and I would check in with myself about what I wanted to eat, and every time, the only thing that appealed to me was a bagel with cream cheese and a soymilk smoothie with blueberries and raspberries.  I would check in with myself again and again, knowing full well that I was: (a) allergic to wheat, thus making bagels a problem, (b) probably overdoing it, for me, on processed grains, (c) not too keen on eating cream cheese when I had sinus congestion and (d) thinking that a cold drink like a smoothie probably wasn’t the best thing for me either, even if blueberries and raspberries couldn’t hurt.  But, I acquiesced, eating smoothies and bagels for pretty much every meal for about 2 and half days.  Amazingly, however, I didn’t have my usual wheat related symptoms, and I got over the cold way more quickly than normal.*

*Results not typical. (To borrow from every diet testimonial ever.)  I don’t use this example to say that you should always let your intuitive sense override knowledge of your food allergies.  What I am saying is that it can be a messy, mixed up process, and that our bodies are complicated and sometimes mysterious.

Perhaps some of you with food allergies that are mild or moderate are much stronger than I am on this topic, and are able to completely avoid those foods.  And if you can, kudos to you.  But if you’re like me (and many of my clients), food allergies, especially to highly popular and/or highly delicious foods, can be a struggle.

So to show some method to my madness, here’s my 4 part plan for working with intuitive eating when you have mild or moderate (i.e., not life threatening) food allergies.

1) When you’re hungry, take a deep breath and check in with your belly.  Ask your belly what it wants.  I find that, very often, even if my mouth is saying “bagels!” my stomach is saying, “Dude, bagels mess us up.  Can we at least compromise and have some brown rice bread?”

2) If you’re not getting a clear response from your stomach, give it some non-allergenic options.  Let your stomach mull it over and digest your options.  Try to pick food from a number of different categories (like different greens, different proteins, etc.) until you hit on ones that feel right.

3) Feed yourself what your body is telling you.  Now here’s the tricky part.  I truly believe that the vast majority of the time, if you’re checking in with your stomach, it’s going to lead you toward non-allergenic foods.  If you find that this isn’t the case for you, again, this is something that I would recommend chatting about with me, so that we can come up with what would work best for you.

4) Focus on feeling good, not being perfect.  Eating well is not about eating perfectly.  Eating well is not about eating 100% organic or completely avoiding sugar or any other rule that you’ve told yourself is required of you.  Eating well is about listening to your body and nourishing your body.

Again, if you’re struggling with food allergies and intuitive eating, I recommend working with me or someone like me to get some individual assistance.  If you’d like to discuss it more here, feel free to comment below.

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Golda Poretsky, H.H.C. is a certified holistic health counselor who specializes in transforming your relationship with food and your body. Go to http://www.bodylovewellness.com/stay-in-touch/ to sign up for her newsletter and get your free download — Golda’s Top Ten Tips For Divine Dining.

If you’re in the NYC area, do not miss Golda’s March classes.  Click here to learn more or to register.

Looking for more support with intuitive eating and getting off diets? Click here to sign up for your FREE Body Love Wellness Consultation.

Please note the time change for our last class!

To learn more, click the image below!

by Golda Poretsky, H.H.C.
www.bodylovewellness.com

Listen to the podcast of this post here:

Last week, thanks to Kevin Smith’s vocalness about his mistreatment on South West airlines and NAAFA’s willingness to let me be their spokesperson, I had the opportunity to appear on two national news programs.

As some of you know, I am a ham. (I was part of a musical improv comedy team at the P.I.T. for a while, and that stuff is not for the faint of heart.) Not only that, though I sometimes struggle with my eagerness to avoid confrontation, I love to have a good fight about things that matter to me, and discrimination in any form really rankles me. So when Kevin Smith decided to talk about his experience, and his 1.6 million twitter fans and the national media decided to listen, I was all too happy to make some appearances for the big fat good.

Until now, Body Love Wellness, has kind of flown under the radar. The toughest, most critical comments I would get were of the, “hey, I don’t think that tip would work for me” variety, and even then the commenters were usually willing to engage with me about what might work for them instead. So I wasn’t accustomed to getting real, trolly hatemail. I wasn’t accustomed to the kind of hatemail and comments that were only about how I looked and had nothing to do with what I wrote or said.

I’m so used to ignoring the comments at various non Fat-O-Sphere blogs that I completely forgot that adults, protected by the veil of the Internet’s anonymity, find it perfectly acceptable to insult other people with bullshit playground name-calling.

The comments started to get to me until a part of me, maybe that little eight-year-old inside of me, said something to the effect of, “Look, you survived elementary school, middle school and junior high for godsakes. How are you going to let some anonymous Internet idiots bring you down?”

And that part of me was right. In other words, I can’t play it small because someone else called me big. I can’t live my life small, avoiding conflict, avoiding the public eye, just because a bunch of jerks think I should be smaller. The more willing we all are to be out there about who we are and what we look like, the more power we will have as a group and as individuals.

In essence, if I weren’t the only fatty on The Early Show on Thursday, then maybe the couple of hostile commenters that took the time to search for me on google, find my blog and comment wouldn’t have known who they should pick to pick on.  Maybe they wouldn’t have even noticed my fatness if fat people on television weren’t so unexpected.

And yes, I’m going to wear an even bigger pattern the next time I’m on TV. :)

So this week, let’s all try to live a little bit bigger. Try something you wouldn’t normally try, speak up about something that matters to you. Extra credit if you wear something outrageous in the process.

As always, let me know how it goes in the comments section!
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Golda Poretsky, H.H.C. is a certified holistic health counselor who specializes in transforming your relationship with food and your body. Go to http://www.bodylovewellness.com/stay-in-touch/ to sign up for her newsletter and get your free download — Golda’s Top Ten Tips For Divine Dining.

If you’re in the NYC area, do not miss Golda’s March classes.  Click here to learn more or to register.

Looking for more support with intuitive eating and getting off diets? Click here to sign up for your FREE Body Love Wellness Consultation.

I’ve been admiring Margarita Tartakovsky’s amazing Weightless blog for some time now.  Happily, the stars aligned, and Margarita and I had the opportunity to interview each other!  Below is my interview with Margarita.  You can go to her blog to check out her interview with me!

Golda Poretsky, H.H.C.: Tell me a little more about your background.

Margarita Tartakovsky, M.S.: I received my BS in psychology from Florida State University and my MS from Texas A&M University, where I studied clinical psychology. My research in both undergrad and grad school looked at the precursors to disordered eating and eating disorders.

Sort of an interesting tidbit: My family and I moved to the US when I was seven from Moscow, Russia. I feel like I have to specify the country, because there’s actually a Moscow, Florida – who knew there’s a Moscow in Florida! And, oddly enough, there’s an Odessa, too, which is a small city in the Ukraine. Talk about random.

Golda: How did you become interested in issues of body image?

Margarita: I think it was partly personal. I’d struggled with my own body image, always wanting to be thinner, prettier. I never thought that I was good enough just as I was. Like so many people, I thought that true happiness would come with being thin. My appearance was also wrapped up in my self-worth, which is true for many, many people, too.

I was also fascinated with our society’s deep-seated thin ideal, women’s magazines, the diet industry, pop culture, along with what contributes to poor body image and disordered eating (habits like restricting, bingeing, yo-yo dieting).

Golda: Where do you find inspiration for your blog ideas?

Margarita: Everywhere, really. Sometimes ideas just pop into my head, especially when I’m in the process of writing a post. I tend to go on tangents. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I can talk about 80 things at once, but I do eventually return to my point. So those tangents get written down in my notebook (or on a napkin, or envelope).

Other times, I find inspiration from blogs (not always body image or eating disorder ones; I follow writing and mental health blogs that are great for ideas, too) or from Twitter. I’ve connected with many wonderful people on Twitter, who’ve graciously given interviews, and who post links to interesting articles. Books are another wonderful source of inspiration and ideas. I’ve gotten several valuable body image tips from books.

I keep a composition notebook for ideas (that’s where I insert the napkins and envelopes, too). Anything that comes to mind or I find, I just write in there. I also keep files on my computer. I typically have tons of questions and not many answers, so those will usually drive what I write about.

Golda: I love the fact that you’re promoting Health At Every Size, which is still not quite mainstream, on a more mainstream site.  How did you end up writing for psychcentral.com?

Margarita: Thanks! I love the Health At Every Size approach because it focuses on the keys to being truly healthy: self-acceptance, self-care, honoring and listening to your body, mindful and intuitive eating, doing physical activities that you enjoy. This approach doesn’t promote shame or guilt, which we’re more used to in this society. It doesn’t discriminate against anyone and it takes weight and unreliable indicators like BMI out of the equation. The point isn’t in losing weight but in adopting healthy habits. If we lose weight but do it by engaging in practices like starving, using diet pills, ignoring our bodies when they’re hungry, restricting ourselves to a low calorie intake, aren’t we being unhealthy? Weight loss is not the end all, be all. And trying to lose weight at all costs is only detrimental to our health.

I’d been a big fan of Psych Central for quite sometime. One day, I finally got up the courage to send John Grohol, the founder and CEO of Psych Central, an email with my resume. He liked my writing and said I could start. My first article for the site was on the efficacy of equine-assisted therapy. Then, from there, I contributed more articles, books reviews and blog posts for the main blog World of Psychology. I’d always wanted to write a blog on body image, so I drafted a proposal for John and he accepted it for the Fall. To say I was ecstatic is an understatement!

Golda: What do you find is the biggest challenge in promoting the message of body acceptance?

Margarita: Wow, that’s a great question. I think the biggest challenge is the idea that you can only accept your body if you fit society’s skinny standard. Magazines, TV shows and even the government tell us that we can’t accept ourselves as we are – until we lose weight, that is. Only then can we fully and happily accept our bodies. If we accept our bodies as they are right now, we’ll become complacent and won’t want to get “healthy” (i.e., drop weight; even though health is what counts anyway, but that’s another story!).

So our culture encourages shame and stigma. If you don’t fit the thin ideal, then you must be ashamed of it, because clearly you aren’t healthy and you aren’t attractive, so why accept, or worse be proud, of being larger? You can only accept your body if you’re thin. How can we accept our bodies when we have flab?

Obviously, this is ridiculous, inaccurate and incredibly damaging. But I think some people just don’t feel like they’re allowed to accept their bodies. They may think that they don’t have the right to, because they’re in some way unacceptable. And, again, that’s outrageous!

Golda: Do you ever find that, even now, you have a day or two where you don’t feel great about your body?  If so, what tools do you like to use to bring yourself back to feeling good about your body?  If not, what are some of your favorite tools for helping others feel good in their bodies?

Margarita: I’m so glad you asked this question! Having a positive body image is an ongoing process. I hope people don’t beat themselves up about that either – that if they aren’t feeling great about their bodies all the time that they’re doing something wrong or they’re a failure.

So the answer is: absolutely! I’m by no means immune to negative thoughts or bad feelings about my body. Usually, this occurs because I’m either sleep-deprived or I feel like I’m not taking good care of myself. But of course, I don’t say that. Instead, I say “I feel fat”; “I look terrible in this outfit”; or simply, “Ugh!” These phrases seem to come naturally, unfortunately, to most people.

During these times, I try to be kind to myself or I tell my negative thoughts to go away. I also like to check in with myself and figure out why it is I feel like this. Sometimes, we simply feel bloated, but, other times, there’s something a bit deeper. Maybe we haven’t been taking care of ourselves, maybe we’re overwhelmed or anxious, maybe we need more sleep. Maybe we’re just in a crappy mood. So I think it’s important to ask yourself, “why?” This is also good to do if you have a tendency to eat when you’re bored, upset, anxious or stressed out. Before you eat something, just check in and ask yourself, “Why do I want to eat?”

Basically, I don’t think we’ll be deliriously happy with our bodies always. The key is to know what to do when a negative thought does pop in. And to challenge it. Negative thoughts might still fly around your head, but if you’re challenging them, then you’re already making progress. If you say to yourself, “wait a minute, I’m just tired, but I do look nice,” or “I feel crappy, that’s why I don’t like anything on me,” or “I am pretty,” or some version of these, you’re already building a better body image.

So you might ask yourself if a negative thought is really accurate, or replace it with a positive thought, saying you accept yourself as you are. Just like you might overeat sometimes, or you’ll likely feel upset sometime in the future, you may feel bad about your body once in awhile. The important things are to recognize that you’re starting to berate your body and to work toward having a more positive body image, without trying to be perfect about it. All the while, remember to be kind to yourself and to take good care of yourself.

I also regularly give tips and tidbits on improving body image that might help. Readers can check them out here.

Thanks so much, Golda, for interviewing me! It was a great experience!