490-Greatest Hits: Gentle Nutrition 101

What is gentle nutrition and how is it different from a diet?

Gentle nutrition is a term coined by Evelyn Tribole, co-creator of intuitive eating, and defined as making choices that honor your health and taste buds while making you feel well. It’s the final principle of intuitive eating, but it isn’t a step you complete once. It’s an ongoing process that looks different for every person, because there is no one-size-fits-all version of what honors your body.

Gentle nutrition is not a diet in disguise. Diet culture and wellness culture both sell the idea that a perfect set of food rules will guarantee a specific outcome, whether that outcome is a smaller body or an optimized one. Gentle nutrition rejects both. You will not develop a nutrient deficiency or gain weight from one snack, one meal, or one day of eating. What matters is what you eat consistently over time, without turning every choice into a moral test.

This distinguishes gentle nutrition from healthism, which is what happens when the desire to be healthy becomes its own form of restriction. Healthism shows up as obsessive food tracking, rigid supplement routines, or anxiety about eating anything labeled unhealthy. Gentle nutrition, by contrast, holds health as one consideration among several, alongside taste, satisfaction, and how food actually makes you feel.

It also helps to know how much food actually influences health. Research on the social determinants of health shows that food and exercise account for roughly fifteen percent of a person’s overall health outcomes. The remaining eighty five percent includes genetics, environment, income, and access, factors largely outside individual control. Gentle nutrition asks you to care for your health without pretending that food alone can protect you from everything.

Transcript

[00:03] Welcome to It’s Beyond the Food podcast, my sister. I’m your host, Stephanie Dodier, and today we’re gonna talk about gentle nutrition 101. We’re gonna unpack how to approach gentle nutrition without dash of diet culture, without eliminating any food, without restrictive eating behavior, how to rethink nutrition in a more gentle, soft, consistent way where you can think about nutrition without being on the on and off switch all the time.

[00:41] This is a classic episode, I have to tell you. This was originally broadcast on May 5th, 2022, so almost four and a half years ago. And the reason why I’m bringing back this classic is because of all our new listeners, our new followers on social media. We’re booming right now, and when I talk to people in the comments section, they can’t comprehend the concept of nutrition without being restrictive, without being good or bad food, healthy or unhealthy.

[01:21] And I keep sending people to the old episode 320 from four years ago. I’m like, “Okay, we’re gonna refresh this. We’re gonna bring it back on the feed, and we’re gonna make it available more easily to people.” So in this episode, we’re gonna talk about what is gentle nutrition, and most important, what is not gentle nutrition, because too often the non-diet diet approach to gentle nutrition is being sold as gentle nutrition, and it’s not. So I’m gonna give you some clear guardrail about how to distinguish what is gentle nutrition and what is not, the role of gentle nutrition in a weight neutral approach to health.

[02:06] And I just wanna mention, if you haven’t listened to last week podcast episode, which was another classic, How to Be Healthier Without Losing Weight, I would go there also and listen to this. And if you’ve listened to the one from last week and you were waiting for this one, because I told you this one was coming, we’re gonna deep dive into, uh, point number five on how to be healthier without losing weight, which is gentle nutrition.

[02:35] So we’re gonna deep dive into gentle nutrition. We’re gonna talk about the caveat of healthism, and you probably have never heard of this term, but I like to describe the word healthism as when desiring to be healthy is going wrong. So stay tuned to listen to that in the podcast, and I’m gonna give you some simple step.

[03:02] I’m gonna talk about the four tenet of gentle nutrition and where to start and how to integrate them and in which order to integrate them in your life. So it’s classic. I hope it help you with some of the base principle of a weight neutral approach to health. And without any further ado, I’ll get my team to patch in the original recording of Gentle Nutrition 101.

[03:26] Have fun, and I’ll see you next week

[03:32] Hello, sisters. How you doing? It’s been a couple weeks now, but I got a story for you that I’m gonna get us started on, and then we’re gonna talk about gentle nutrition, because that story that I’m about to tell you actually generated my desire to talk about gentle nutrition.

[03:52] So let’s get into the story. Some of you who follow me on social media, you know that I’ve started to travel again. I am a digital nomad, which means that I travel the world while still working. So my business is built by design, I decided that six years ago. That’s another podcast perhaps. But my business was intentionally designed so that I can work from anywhere in the world.

[04:25] And we all know that in the last two years COVID happened, and I moved from being a digital nomad to being someone that stays at home for two years in a row. But in December 2021, I started to travel again, and I just came back literally a couple weeks ago from a travel portion that lasted almost five months.

[04:51] And when I travel, there’s a community of people like me, digital nomad, that work from different places in the world, and there’s companies that cater to our needs of finding living spaces in different place in the world that have excellent internet and different other services that we need for people like us.

[05:14] And the company that I travel with is called Outsite, so if any of you want to know about that, please contact me on social media. I’ve got a link for them. You need to apply. They do some reference checking and security, and then you become a member, and you use one of their 25 location around the world, and you do co-living, meaning that they have houses where typically there’s four to five people living in it, and we rent a room, and we have access to community spaces, kitchen, living room, outdoor facilities, and so forth.

[05:53] And so that get me to my story about food. So I spent the last five months in a co-living space living with three other people, and we have one fridge, and so we shared the fridge. The fridge is divided into four spaces, so each one of us has their space, and same thing with the pantry. So- Without me realizing, this adventure over the last five months changed the way that I interact with food again.

[06:28] And so I’ve been on the journey of intuitive eating now for probably five years, and this is the last stage of intuitive eating. What happened in the last five months is truly, like, the end phase of intuitive eating, where food became not a thing anymore in my life. It’s like I don’t… It happened without me intentionally wanting it to happen, but it’s like I put a bow, a big red bow, on a Christmas gift.

[07:06] I’ve had different relationship to food my whole life. For the first 25, 30 years of my life, food meant gaining or losing weight. And then so I moved away from that, and then that food then became for about five, six years, the five years of me intensely studying nutrition in school and then having a clinical practice on the ground in Toronto, food became the gateway to optimum health.

[07:40] And then intuitive eating came into my life, and food became satisfaction, ’cause I really had to train myself, both from a place of thinking, from a place of emotion, that food could be satisfaction to me. After decades of restriction, that’s something that I literally had to relearn from the ground up.

[08:08] And as we teach in intuitive eating, the pendulum swung. So I went from not knowing that you… it was okay to have satisfaction with food to, like, being hyper-focused on satisfaction. And I stayed there for a few years, and then food became freedom Food became a way of expressing my liberation of diet culture.

[08:38] And then recently, over that last five months, food became just food. No emotion, no liberation, no satisfaction, just food. No goals whatsoever around food. Not health, not weight, not liberation, not freedom. Just food. Just eating. That’s why I came up with this expression, I’m using it right now in the marketing of Undiet Your Life.

[09:13] I say, “Confident eating, it’s just eating,” right? So I came home after that trip, and that transition had happened without me realizing it because I was in this fi- environment where I couldn’t have a lot of food, so I couldn’t make complicated recipes. I couldn’t have an assortment of food in case I wanted something.

[09:40] I was living a food life like everybody else in the house. And I had a couple points during the trip where I realized, like I’m eating like the rest of the people. Like eating is not a thing anymore. But it, like it quickly, that thought came in and evaded me. But I came home. This is where it gets interesting.

[10:01] I get… I came home, and I live in a two-bedroom condo, right? I downsized everything when I decided to build this business as part of achieving my dream. I had to do some financial choices, and I moved, and I downsized everything to get some equities to start my business and, and so forth. So anyway, I live in a two-bedroom condo, so it’s, it’s very limited in space.

[10:29] It’s not tiny, but it’s just not a lot of space. And I have a pantry, like a two-door pantry, like normal people live in a two-bedroom house. And I remember when I came in that night, I opened the pantry to see what I needed, and I was shocked to look at how much food I had. And these were food that obviously weren’t perishable because I left for five months.

[11:00] And I look at them, I’m like and it became overwhelming. And then I turn around, I’m like, “Should I open the fridge door or not?” Remember, there’s no perishable. I open the fridge door, and it’s the lineup of condiments, vinegars, and like spices, and nutritional yeast. Like all the things. Like half of the fridge is filled with condiments And then the overwhelm just came all over me.

[11:32] I’m like, “Holy crap, I don’t need that much food. Why do I have that much food? I spent five months living with a quarter section of a regular size fridge and a basket and a pantry. Why the hell do I have this much?” And I just closed everything up and went to bed that night because I’m not… I didn’t even have the energy to go to the grocery store that night.

[12:00] And then I kept thinking about it for about the next seven days. I’m like, “Why do I have so much?” And then I realized that I had so much because food for all of my adult life was a thing. It was something that was filling, fulfilling a purpose, something to be fixed, something to get better at. It was never just food.

[12:29] So three day, four day, five days ago, Saturday morning, a week after I came back, I was doing dishes in the kitchen and I turn around and look at the pantry. I’m like, “We’re cleaning this up.” Like, we don’t need this. It n- doesn’t make us feel good anymore. It’s not making us feel like we’re free at all. It’s like it was weighing me down.

[12:55] So I started to clean the pantry and oh my God, you guys, I had stuff in there that I had not used in years because there was food in there from my phase of food is health. Like, I had all kinds of, quote, ‘health food, wellness culture food,’ like cacao nibs. I’ve never liked cacao nibs. Never. I found it bitter.

[13:28] But in the days that I was keto that I couldn’t eat sugar, that was the closest thing that I was, quote, ‘allowed to have’ in the chocolate family, right? And then I had three different kinds of coconut: roasted coconut, like cooked coconut, shredded coconut Why did I have that? And then I looked at the four things of coconut and I’m like, because that gave me the illusion of sweetness.

[14:02] When I… One of the phases of my life, sugar was a bad thing, and these were buried at the back of my cupboard. I don’t know why, and I asked myself why. And I realized in that moment, I was on my ladder in front of the pantry, looking at these three things of coconut. I’m like, at some point in my journey of intuitive eating, I had the thought, “I’m not gonna eat healthier.

[14:31] I’m gonna eat better,” which is a whole other podcast coming up. I’m gonna eat better so I will want that again, and that’s why I kept the damn coconut. And then I turn around and I look, an entire shelf of supplement. I don’t take supplement anymore. I don’t. Like, the one thing I took recently was a probiotic because of being in Latin America and different water.

[15:03] That’s all I take. Yet I had, like, protein powder and glutamine and, like… Oh my God I threw out, you ready? Eight white garbage bag of stuff that h- three quarters of it was expired and a quarter of it was half consumed or a quarter consumed. I couldn’t give it to anyone. Eight bags, half the pantry. My pantry, now I’m single, okay?

[15:36] So don’t compare yourself to me. The pantry is like three shelf. From six big shelves, three tiny shelf, and I feel liberated. I feel liberated not because of the food, because of the fact that food doesn’t take so much space anymore in my life So that’s half the podcast. I just realized we’re 13 minutes in almost, and that was my story.

[16:08] And that Saturday morning, climbed up in that ladder in my pantry, I’m like, “How many other women are there? How many other women are at that place or where I was a couple years ago, and they don’t know what gentle nutrition is? They don’t know how to take their journey to the end phase of intuitive eating.”

[16:35] So I thought for the rest of the podcast, let’s think about, for those of you who’ve never heard of gentle nutrition, let’s start unpacking gentle nutrition. So first of all, gentle nutrition is a term created by Evelyn Tribole. Evelyn Tribole is, with Elyse Resch, created the term, the concept of intuitive eating.

[16:58] Evelyn is my mentor when it comes to intuitive eating. She was my coach years ago. I’ve had her on the podcast twice, so if you’re a fan of Evelyn, one- 186 and 278, and she’s also been on my professional podcast. And she wrote in her book her definition of gentle nutrition as intended within intuitive eating.

[17:19] So I’m gonna read that to you. “Gentle nutrition is making choices that honor your health and taste bud while making you feel well. Remember that you do not have to eat perfectly to be healthy. You will not suddenly get a nutrient deficiency or gain weight from one snack, one meal, or one day of eating.

[17:43] It’s what you eat consistently over time that matter. Progress, not perfection, is what counts.” So think of gentle nutrition as an ongoing process of learning and discovery. Contrary to what diet culture and wellness culture has told us, it’s not a one-fit-all approach Meaning that what gentle nutrition is for you, it’s not gonna be the same as what it is for me.

[18:13] And that’s where many women get stuck into, is they have changed the way they think about hunger and fullness and satisfaction, and then they, without knowing, just like I was, keep holding on to the thought that once they’re gone through the process of intuitive eating… Because by the way, intuitive eating is a process.

[18:41] It’s not an endpoint. Intuitive eating is a process to heal your relationship to food after restriction, right? It’s a, first of all, it’s a process that was created in, in research in the context of eating disorder, and then it’s been taken out of the context of eating disorder and made accessible to the average person because they realize that the pattern that were accentuated in, in eating disorder were the exact same pattern that women who simply were dieting had.

[19:16] In the case of eating disorder, it’s just to the next level, right? So, intuitive eating’s a process. It’s not something you stay in for the rest of your life. You evolve through it, and the endpoint is gentle nutrition, right? It’s… But you have to change the way you think about what nutrition is in order for you to be able to approach it in this new way Gentle nutrition is also the endpoint of reconnecting with your body, of trusting your body, right?

[19:58] You learn through the process of intuitive eating to trust your hunger, your fullness, your satisfaction, and now you have to take this and learn to trust your body when it comes to your health. And you need to change the definition of health. We’ll get to that in just a minute, but just like the thin ideal is a fraud from diet culture created to sell their product, guess what?

[20:28] The way that we’re taught nutrition is meant to sell the product of wellness culture. It’s not the true definition of health. So all of that needs to be cleaned up in our head as well. Let’s get into learning or thinking about health differently. So health is not an endpoint. It’s not a thing to reach that will protect you from all disease and allow you to live eternally.

[20:59] And I’m laughing as I’m saying that because for years I believed that, right? If I finally get healthy enough, I’ll be protected from all the thing that could happen to me. It’s not even that health, but it’s sold to, to us like this optimum health concept is sold to us just like the fricking thin ideal, right?

[21:18] Diet culture tells us, “Well, when you’re thin enough, when you reach, like, this way of your body look like, you’ll be happy forever,” right? You’ll have everything you want in your life. Wellness culture comes around and say, “When you reach optimum health, you’ll never be sick again, and you’ll live eternally, and you have a shitload of energy.”

[21:38] Bullshit. Both of those things are not true. Health is a state of adaptation Health is a process that the human body uses to adapt to its environment. Health is mental, it’s emotional, it’s physical, and also spiritual Health is not just a bunch of number on a chemistry lab. It’s how you feel in your mind, how you feel in your emotion.

[22:19] Are you anxious and stressed and constricted, or are you loose, flexible, and happy and jovial? That’s health, right? Health is more than just physical, and it’s a process we go through. We never reach a place and we never get sick again if we maintain a diet. That’s not true. That health is supposed to go through ups and down.

[22:47] Health is the mechanism that your body uses to survive whatever environment you’re in. So that’s the kind of the stuff that we need to relearn so that we can create a way of living with that, that gives us the happiness that we’re looking for. But if we are functioning from a faulty definition of health or even nutrition, we never can get to this place of peace.

[23:17] And here’s another thing that links health and gentle nutrition. Here’s another piece of false information that we are given. We are told that food and exercise is the thing that creates our health. That’s a lie. That’s another lie. It’s not true. When we look at contributor to health, this is science, right?

[23:44] Things that contributes to one human’s health. Food and exercise is only, get ready, 15%, one five. The social determinant of health, let’s imagine that’s 100%, only 15% of what contributes to human health is food and exercise. I know, right? And yet here we are being told that if we eat, quote, “healthy”, we’ll get healthy.

[24:21] No. Because there’s 85% of what contributes to your health status that is not in your control, right? Think about genetics, think about environment, think about social circumstance. If you’re born in a food desert, a place where all you have access to is food from the convenience store, and yes, there’s a lot of people who live in that kind of environment that don’t own a car to go and drive to Costco on the weekend, and certainly don’t have the financial means to buy their food at Costco So that, the space, the mental space, the emotional space that people who live in that kind of very limited space financially, emotionally, mentally, availability, that impacts their health too, the stress that they have to carry all the time.

[25:23] Plus the fact that they don’t have h- access to fresh food, right? These are just some of the things that I’m gonna take the time to talk about on the podcast today, but I could do, like, two hours on telling you why there’s so many other things that contribute to your health that are not even in your control.

[25:42] So spending all this time obsessing about getting nutrition right in order to get to your health, what else are you not doing in your life? I know. Like, that time that you spend researching, thinking about nutrition and hoping that through the process of intuitive eating you’re gonna get to this place where you can go back and be obsessive about nutrition and get your nutrition right so you can be healthy and achieve optimum health and be protected.

[26:16] How much of your mental, emotional resources and your time resources is spent on that? What else are we not doing in our life? What dreams are we not working on? What things are we not allowing ourselves to do because we spend all our resources on this? That’s the work inside of that last phase of intuitive eating, is debunking all of these misunderstandings, straighten it all up, and then working on our thinking patterns around nutrition and health so that we can access that food is not a thing stage, right?

[27:02] Just eating, including our health and nutrition. That’s what gentle nutrition is at the highest level. I’m gonna do a couple more episode on this in weeks to come about, like, food flexibility, the four pillar of gentle nutrition, trying to help you, for those of you who are working on their relationship to food and body on your own, that you don’t have a coach, you don’t have a mentor, trying to give you some of the highlights that you can integrate in your life.

[27:42] You may not have to throw out eight garbage bag out of your pantry like me. Remember, I was a professional in this field. But I want you to take eight garbage bag of thoughts out of your brain or of emotion that don’t serve you and throw that out. May not be eight physical bag of stuff.

[28:07] It may be eight bags of thoughts and emotion that don’t serve you. So you can go and use all these resources on chasing the life that you want. And that’s the goal of undieting your life is to be a confident eater, a person who’s confident in her body image and that lives a confident life. With that in mind, I love you, sister, and I’ll see you on the next episode.

[28:36] If you’re loving what you’re learning on the podcast, you have to come and check out Confident, my program on body acceptance and the confidence that grows from it. Come to our website to stephaniedodier.com/confident. This way you can take the concept that I teaching you on the podcast further into actual application in your life so you can feel confident, stop worrying about your weight, other people’s opinion, and care for your wellbeing without weight loss.

[29:11] Come and join me and other women learning how to reshape your confidence, not your body. I’ll see you there