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Customizing Your Diet + Empowered Diet Checklist

This blog took far longer to write than I expected. After writing and scraping multiple different ideas and articles. I finally realized that no matter how hard I try I can never find a perfect diet that works for all of us. I mean if there was then I bet we’d all have tried it out and we’d be super happy with our bodies. But that isn’t the reality. However we can try to get as close to it as possible and I couldn’t think of a better way to convince you about how small changes can have such a profound impact on our health and how weight isn’t always the correct parameter to address; than by sharing my own health journey. Read along for a bonus – empowered diet checklist.

Before I started studying nutrition, everytime someone would say health I would almost always think about my weight or the patients in a hospital. Not once did it occur to me that we could have a conversation about health outside of weight loss and hospitalization. This isn’t particularly surprising because as a society we are obsessed with weight and convince ourselves that “if” we hit a certain number on the scale then we will be happy and healthy. I put the word – if – in quotes because this whole idea that “if I have something then I will be/have ___” is simply nonsensical. We live in the present moment and by saying that once you buy something or reach a number on the scale, only then can you be happy, successful, worthy of love or whatever else. You are cheating yourself of the only thing in your control – the present moment.

However when I started studying about the subject of nutrition and about health, I was genuinely surprised by the sheer amount of data and information on becoming more healthy and staying healthy, thereby preventing diseases. When I say disease I mean both physical and mental illnesses and when I say health I mean overall health. (Read this article for a better understanding of what health and dieting really mean). This information can help heal our relationship with our bodies, our weight and with our minds. You are probably wondering If such a thing is possible then why aren’t more people talking about it? Where can I find this information?

To answer your questions:

  1. Your doctor doesn’t have the time to tell you about this because their duty is to diagnose and treat diseases, not to prevent disease and promote health. That is the role of health coaches and nutritionists.

  2. You see and hear only the information that is “in demand” which is all about weight.

  3. You haven’t found the community of holistic health, health coaching and holistic healing.

Now the little story that you signed up to read:

Even as a kid I never liked the typical “junk food” that other kids enjoy. A good home cooked meal and I would be happy. Although of course I did and still do enjoy some “junk food” every so often. I never did sports but I loved being outdoors and playing all the weird games my friends and I would come up with. This made me stand out a little and I used to be compared to my friends not by my parents but my friends parents. And in order to “be normal” and “fit in”, as I got older I started eating more junk every chance I got and stopped playing outside as much. It was around this time that all my friends from my neighborhood moved away and I changed schools for the first time ever in my life. The stress, the workload, new environment, zero activity, less sleep and not to mention eating breakfast and lunch at school took its toll on me and I gained a lot of weight.

I was the heaviest I had ever been and that was when we started taking yoga lessons at home. For an hour everyday I would have someone tell me to move and breathe in a certain way. I was terribly uncomfortable in the beginning. I hated how I looked, I was not comfortable in my own skin and hated the fact that I couldn’t hold most of the Asanas that my parents could. But as the classes progressed I felt more comfortable and free in my own skin. I felt free and active despite my weight. When I started college and studying nutrition, that information and this class had a compound effect on my health. However, all that changed and went in the opposite direction when we had to stop those classes and I suddenly lost a whole lot of weight. I was finally at the desired number on the scale.

The biggest disappointment was I felt nothing like I thought I would. I was lazy all the time, barely had energy for anything, slept throughout the day and stopped enjoying my favorite activities. But the worst thing was that I could no longer eat without feeling nauseated by the sight of food and my appetite had halved. Although I looked like my ideal self, I felt like a useless bag of bones that was constantly annoyed by everything. Then one day my aunt complimented me. She said “you’ve never looked prettier”, when I could hardly stand up straight without feeling exhausted. It was in that moment that I realized that a number on the scale and your reflection in the mirror, do not always correspond to your best self or your happiest/healthiest self. It was then that I realised that I had to heal my own relationship with my body, weight and that I had to redefine what health meant to me, before I started helping others as a Dietician. Creating this blog is also a part of that journey and I am so glad to be able to share it with you.

I apologize for that cringy story. Before you get bored and stop reading here is the checklist as promised. Click here to download the Empowered Diet Checklist. You can find more such lists under the Resources tab on my website.

 
 
 

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