Nourishing Your Body

What do you think about when you think of nourishing your body? When I say “nourishment,” I’m talking about anything you might eat or drink to sustain and care for your body. Do you think of a delicious meal, or diet culture? Joy and anticipation, or fear, anxiety, and all-around drudgery?

No one can deny the harms of diet culture and the food industry. From a litany of messages about what you should or shouldn’t eat, how much or little you should eat, the notion of “good” foods and “bad” foods, many of us carry shame, trauma, and a variety of other feelings about food and nourishing our bodies. Even if we are able to deconstruct all the “shoulds” of the powers that be, how do we reconstruct a healthy relationship between our bodies and what we consume?

First, we can change the way we talk about food. No more “good” or “bad” foods, just foods that we enjoy and food that we do not. The goal is pleasure, what feels good to us, as humans who are bodies. Second, we can honor our hunger, ensuring we have enough energy to sustain ourselves as we go about our days. Similarly, we can honor our satisfaction or satiation, i.e., feeling full and content. Third, we can honor our health, paying attention to what satisfies our bodily needs and makes us feel good.

For further ideas regarding how to nourish your body, there are numerous resources about Intuitive Eating, some links for which I will list below. Ultimately, your body is good and worth being nourished.

Further Resources

Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, "Ten Principles of Intuitive Eating," The Original Intuitive Eating Pros, https://www.intuitiveeating.org/10-principles-of-intuitive-eating.

McBride, H. L. “Living as a Body: The Goodness of Feeding Ourselves” & “Ways to Practice Feeding Yourself.” The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection through Embodied Living, BrazosPress, 2021, pp. 243-6.