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If you found this blog post because you put food freedom in the search bar, clicked through and you’re now reading, welcome. This blog post will give you basic first steps and help you also dive deeper.
I’m a registered dietitian and I have been one for close to 25 years now. I have been helping people most of that time with a complicated history with food to let go of the burden of food decisions to finally enjoy eating again. I think everyone deserves to have a relationship with food that is actually satisfying and pleasurable. And if they’re also wanting to, ways to promote health.
If you are struggling with feelings of failure, I want you to know that you’re not failing in your relationship with food, rather functioning as designed by all the diets and all the systems that have pushed it. Those diets and those systems, they are the real villain, and I call them the I-should-eat script. With every new diet, it’s many I should eat this, I should eat that directions….aka I-should-eat scripts.
What is the opposite of I-should-eat scripts? Maybe food freedom?
Defining food freedom
Many practitioners and people on the internet talk and teach about food freedom. One definition: a way of connecting to food that has no rules and rejecting their automatic default setting of guilt that comes with eating certain foods. Food freedom also includes a way of moving away from using the scale as a measure of progress
This is where most food freedom practitioners stop. I notice the practice helps the individual yet does not consider the bigger picture.
Who gets to access food freedom?
Every human being should have access to feeling at home in their body, feeling safe in their body, and also a positive relationship with food that is filled with dignity and pleasure. I am grateful that food freedom school is an onboarding to a non-diet world. But there needs to be more.
Food freedom is more of the first exit ramp off that dieting superhighway to a more nuanced roadmap to rejecting diet culture. I don’t want you to stop at food freedom for yourself. I hope it’s just the first layer that you work through.
First steps toward food freedom
I picture those reading this new to escaping diets as still seeing that superhighway behind you as you are taking the Food Freedom Exit. You may be starting to see ahead other options that include eating food without guilt, eating foods that maybe you were told you can never have again, and doing the work to reclaim permission to enjoy food again. And you might find yourself wanting some kind of structure or concrete ways of helping you make those steps.
Food freedom via intuitive eating
Many have found concrete steps through Intuitive Eating. Thankfully, I read Intuitive Eating in 2004ish and over the last 20 years, I’ve added more nuance to my understanding as I’ve learned more. And what I have learned is this: rejecting diets is not an individual experience. When you’re rejecting diets, you’re not only helping yourself in your complicated relationship with food, you’re helping someone else in your community to feel more at home in their body.
Who food freedom leaves out
There’s this individual experience for a small select few: those who don’t experience food insecurity or poverty. They maybe don’t live in a body that experiences a lot of hardship. Maybe they don’t experience racism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. Maybe they have a body size that is accepted in their community, but what about people who will never be thin or white or able-bodied? Or what about people who are living in poverty or constantly neglected by their caregivers? Or what about people who are experiencing starvation because of genocide? What about food freedom for that person? Don’t they deserve access to food freedom?
Of course they do. And I know you agree with me.
Helping yourself can help others. Just don’t stop there.
Healing your complicated relationship with food while you have safe, reliable food is important because as you do that work, you can then help those without the access.
Naomi Wolf is a writer from many, many years ago talks about how a dieting person is easier to control because the dieter is distracted. Even more, they are probably not eating enough so the brain is just not functioning as well.
As you start to feed yourself, you may notice you literally start to wake up. And at first, you may focus on helping yourself, which is really important. We gotta put the gas mask on ourself, right, before we help those around us. So helping yourself to experience food freedom, or whatever we wanna call it, is important work. And what I hope, and this is the big message of finding your food voice, it doesn’t stop there.
As you start to wake up, you will start to see how this is different from other people around you who have different lives and different access. And you may be able to easily connect with people in your community who have different lives. But what about people who are half a world away experiencing genocide and violence? That’s gonna take a lot of brain power to help fix the world be a better, safer place for everyone.
If you’re someone who is kind of like, well, I think I just want to work on myself and not consider the collective. That is fine. Be well. I hope you experience a relationship with food that feels like permission and helps you to recover. You deserve that.
Keep this in mind: individual food freedom pursuits are just a bandaid on a bullet wound. People experiencing food insecurity, racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, or people experiencing genocide–these are people who are the canaries in the coal mine.
These are humans experiencing the opposite of food freedom before people of privilege experience the opposite of food freedom. So you may be able to help yourself now, but there’s probably gonna come a time in the future where it’s gonna be even harder for folks with privilege to also experience food freedom. So I hope as you do your own work, you continue to dig deeper and move toward helping your community, helping your country you live in, helping the world so every person can experience a positive relationship with food.
