If you found me because you put food peace in the search bar and you clicked through: Thank you for trusting me to help you to understand food peace and the concepts around it. This blog post will give you basic first steps.

I help people with a complicated relationship with food let go of the burden of food decisions to finally enjoy eating again. If you’re struggling with feelings of failure with your relationship with food, I want you to know you are not failing rather functioning as designed by all the diets you’ve tried and all of the systems that created them. Those systems are the real villain–I call them the I-should-eat scripts.

I hear Mercury is in a massive turn around and all the planets are not playing nicely so maybe that is why my writing today feels clunky? Or maybe I am still processing this topic?

Whatever it is, here is something I typed out that is not very refined yet holds my thoughts of how my way of helping our food relationships have shifted over the years.

I used to call myself a Food Peace Promoter yet don’t anymore.

I want to help you understand why I don’t say food peace anymore especially if you have been reading my work or listening to my podcast back when I did. Understanding the nuances around how we relate to food took time for me to understand and conceptualize. To let you know a little bit about myself, I’m someone who thinks in feelings, not words (enneagram 4 vibes all the way). Coming to a place where I have words to share with you about relating with food, it takes a long time and bandwidth. I have learned I can’t rush it and it just has to marinate for a long time.

You may notice me talking about it in a little bit of a different way than other people who use the word food peace or food freedom. There’s a reason why and it’s going to help your relationship with food even more and help better the world at the same time.

I even trademarked food peace!

So back to food peace. Did you know that I trademarked the phrase food peace back in 2010? Around 2004 when I decided I could no longer help people to diet I called myself an anti-diet zealot. If you followed me on twitter early on that is how I introduced myself there! Someone mentioned to me around those twitter days maybe it’d be helpful for me to describe what I do as the positive rather the negative. When I sat down to brainstorm I outlined how diets were painful, destructive and futile; the opposite on the continuum back then was food peace. I pictured a food utopian experience where food served as the great connector with permission for pleasure and satisfaction.

I know food is a connector and not to be eaten just when mechanically hungry. I’m half Polish and every funeral or wedding I’ve been to on the Polish side of my family includes a ton of different foods like kielbasa and pierogies. And did I eat them only when I was hungry? Heck no! I was gonna eat the kalbasa and pierogies because these were like the really well-made ones, you know? And also I was with my family that I didn’t get to see very often and we were celebrating or mourning. And I don’t think Polish traditions are unique in that way of using food in celebrations and in grief. We know that happens all around the world.

So why can’t we have a relationship with food that honors that first and foremost, and even takes a step further that honors healing, recovery.

How far can food peace take us?

So if you are recovering from an eating disorder or you are recovering from diet rock bottom, and maybe you live in a body that’s never gonna be thin, you deserve to have a peaceful relationship with food too. What if also you have hard to manage diabetes? Do you also deserve a peaceful relationship with food? Hell yes you do. And I think having that first and foremost is priority.

Healing always comes first

And even as my way of helping people with their complicated history with food has evolved and changed, that is still the foundation. Healing is always priority when you work with me, when you read anything that I’ve written, or listen to anything that I have recorded. I think that’s the most important thing. If you want to pursue health, yeah, you can do that alongside it, but I also think healing needs to come first.

When food peace no longer fit for me

Why did I like move away from it then if I actually went ahead and put that little TM next to the phrase food peace? When I first did my podcast, starting in January of 2016 until 2022, I called myself a food peace promoter. Around 2020 or so, I did start to appreciate how different people, depending on their particular history and set of circumstances, would define recovery differently. Peace would look different for different people. And I tried to hold on to food peace as the way I was teaching it but it eventually stopped fitting.

When dieting feels as the only way to choose foods and you’re on a dieting superhighway of despair, you may notice an exit labeled Food Freedom or Food Peace. They can be the first steps for you to start to consider that dieting is not the only way to manage your relationship with food.

As you take this exit, know it doesn’t stop there. You get a new roadmap that is a completely nuanced, different way of experiencing food. That final destination is not individual food peace rather considering a bigger world view. What I have come to appreciate is repairing your relationship with food is gonna look one way for people who have:

access to enough food
who are white
thin
cisgender
heterosexual
able-bodied

When we’re rejecting diets personally we cause this ripple effect to create more exit ramps for more people so they can also get the roadmap away from dieting. How cool is that? And I don’t think it’s enough.

Doesn’t everybody deserve access to that roadmap so they don’t have to be tortured by diets anymore? As you gain access to a peaceful relationship with food, I hope you pay it forward.

If we can all do this together, help people who don’t have as much access, why not? Unfortunately, food peace felt too individual and didn’t promote improving access and the interconnectedness we have with each other.

People are experiencing food insecurity or they don’t live in a safe place where they can actually access a grocery store or they are experiencing famine or starvation because of genocide and I want them to also have food peace. But it’s not going to come from peace rather by coming together and using our voices.

Food peace to Food Voice

In 2022, after brainstorming with a few folks I landed on Food Voice. I will be typing out more on that in a few. Until then, take care.