Guest blog: Simple phrases for body liberation

I’m delighted to share this guest blog from author Ambika Kamath. During one of our coaching sessions she combined intuitive eating principles with an old maxim from Julia Child, and I instantly knew that others would learn a lot from the way Ambika’s mind works. If you’re on the intuitive eating journey or curious about it, check out the blog.

Change is hard, even in simple circumstances. And there is nothing simple about shifting our thoughts, feelings, and actions around our bodies and our relationships to food. 

When I started on a journey towards intuitive eating about a year ago, I felt overwhelmed by the scope of change that lay ahead of me…it wasn’t just about how much needed to change but also how far-reaching this change needed to be, how many different areas of my life it would be entangled with. From choosing half a dozen meals and snacks each day, to sometimes-joyful-and other-times-onerous trips to the gym, to picking out clothes for dozens of different contexts, to food-centered celebrations with community, to choosing which social media, tv shows, and podcasts to consume, to desire, attractiveness, and sex, to pregnancy and parenthood—my beliefs about food, movement, and bodies showed up everywhere!

As I waded into this overwhelming morass, I needed some guiding principles—something simple to hold on to, something I could easily return to whenever I felt lost. Equally, I knew this simple truth I was searching for could not be simplistic. After all, it was simplistic black-and-white thinking—good vs. bad, healthy vs. unhealthy, fit vs. unfit, sexy vs. unsexy—that I was working to free myself from. And taking the first few steps into intuitive eating had shown me that food and movement rules hurt much more than they help. My guiding principles thus needed to be just as nuanced as they were straightforward.  

While reading Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch’s excellent book on intuitive eating, I came across a delightful maxim from Julia Child: in matters of nutrition, consider taste; in matters of taste, consider nutrition. I knew immediately I had found the guiding light I needed. It was gentle—not a rule, but a suggestion to consider. It was nuanced—holding two truths at once, it eschewed black-and-white thinking in favor of an approach to choice that was both expansive and supportive. It became a foundation of my intuitive eating practice, and the template for other foundations. 

I was inspired to come up with other comparable principles. While none of them are quite as charming as Julia Child’s original, they’ve each found their place in how I approach food, movement, and body: 

• in matters of fun, consider movement; in matters of movement, consider fun. 

• let yourself be hungry; let yourself be full. 

• numbers (on the scale, on the step counter, on the glucometer) aren’t your enemy, numbers aren’t your god.

This is all a work in progress, and always will be. I’m still figuring out how to frame “don’t eliminate foods, add foods” as less of a rule and more of a nuanced and simple truth, for example. There remain many spheres of life where I still struggle to hold the complexity of being a human who is doing their best to tend to their body in an often-unsupportive world. I’m still in search of more and more guiding principles, so if you have any you’d like to share, I’d love to hear them!

-ambika kamath