food glorious food

’Fitness’ and food have a complex relationship. As a well trained yoga teacher with absolutely NO nutritional expertise what-so-ever I am all to often asked for my opinion on diet and food. Whilst I’m a good yoga teacher (I can sing my praises here cos it’s my own page ; ) and can help guide you with your movement needs, I’d make a terrible nutritionist. My opinions on food and diet are only really applicable to myself and not for public consumption. 

I have learned the hard way over the years that it is important to be incredibly mindful of the pseudoscience that forms the foundations of some 'wellness and health' agendas. Beware my friends, be very aware. My biggest frustration at the moment is all the extreme elimination diets out there, something the yoga community likes to dabble in. Ruby Tandoh put words to my annoyance today when she eloquently tweeted the following…

“there are so many people who medically benefit from elimination diets - everything from coeliac to diabetes, even specific types of epilepsy. The problem with vague 'wellness' is that it chucks a one size fits all diet at us all - which harms as many as it heals & contributes to food fear, fatphobia, classism and, crucially, mis/underdiagnosis of people who actually need these diets for their health”

YES Ruby! 

She also tweeted a link to the Angry Chef Blog and I promptly got lost for an hour, I came up for air to write this post and eat a sandwich and I would like to highly encourage those of you who are interested in the murky muddy waters of 'wellness' to have a peak too. Start with THIS article below and proceed with a curious mind. 

Food is a vital, enjoy it, share it and take care of yourself.

opinion

Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world. It requires profound purpose larger than the self kind of understanding. 

- Bill Bullard

"When I teach now, I no longer look at a posture as something to do, nor at the student as someone who should do it. I see the posture as something to try, and the student as someone who might find it interesting, with or without the potential benefit of my experience, which may or may not apply to them. However they engage the posture, it will be with their body: the body that they are, the body they live through, a body I am not, a body that does not exist as I experience it but as they do, in a way that I will never fully know.

Realizing that you can never fully know someone — because you are not their body, which means you can neither possess nor change them — is at the root of being able to love them while glimpsing your own strangeness, and while keeping the bullshit to a minimum."

-- Matthew Remski

Quote taken from the blog post 'I am not (what you need) from my body: Expanding-on-a-yoga-meme" . Worth a read!