Slow Sparks

Chapter 3

Two days had gone by since I showed up at my dad's house unannounced. He was ecstatic then and he was still ecstatic now. He'd cooked all of my favourites since I'd been home, for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I was definitely spoiled. Thankfully, my business was easy to take with me. All I needed was the shop's Wi-Fi connection and I could conduct my business. Filming TikTok videos, and Reels for Instagram, while not being laughed at by my father or his employees, proved to be the real challenge. But I persevered.

Currently, I sat in my childhood bedroom at the same desk I'd used during high school while waiting for the rest of the clients form my group coaching to show up.

Since it was the start of a new group, the first of this year, the women were still a little shy. I didn't have any men or agender clients this round, but I'd had them before. As the last minute stragglers rolled in, I turned on my microphone. After the first few sessions where I outlined what we were going to do, and everyone introduced themselves, I liked to start basically with outlining intuitive eating, what it is, and why we start by rejecting diet culture. A lot of my previous and current clients had 'tried' intuitive eating before, but mostly just gave themselves unbridled permission to eat. And while that was an important part of it, it wasn't the end all be all, and it set people up for failure.

"Morning, ladies," I smiled and waved at the camera. "I hope you all had a nice weekend." Better than mine. I added in my head. "Today I want to talk about diet culture. What do you think when you hear 'diet culture'?"

"Sweating for the wedding," Janine said quickly. She was also engaged. Except not also because I wasn't engaged anymore.

"That's definitely a good one. Anyone else?"

"Losing the holiday weight."

"Keto or low carb."

"Any type of restrictive diet would qualify," I said.

"Getting bikini season ready."

"Thos are all very good responses. They're very specific examples, and I want to make it general. Diet Culture is the inherit belief that thinness is the ultimate goal, that it's inherently better, healthier and more desirable. It gives us the idea that we are bad, or unworthy if we gain weight. It gives us the idea that there are good and bad foods. What we need is food neutrality."

"Food neutrality?" Amanda asked.

"It means that food has no moral value. Food is not good or bad. Eating a cupcake doesn't mean you're being bad, and eating a salad certainly doesn't mean you're being good. We need to take the good and bad out of food, the right and wrong."

"I'm scared if I do that, I'll just eat only sugary, processed foods."

"That might be true," I said. "In the beginning, it is for some people. But it won't always be like that."

For the next hour, we talked about their fears, about being worried that rejecting diet mentality would lead to weight gain. When that got mentioned, we had to do a deep dive into our feelings about why weight gain was bad. Wanting to exist in a body that fit into typical beauty standards wasn't a bad thing. It was normal. Thin privilege was a real thing and one. Wanting to lose weight was valid, but not the purpose of my group. The purpose was to heal messed up relationships with food that kept my clients trapped in the restrict, binge cycle that was extremely detrimental to their mental, physical, and emotional health. I had a therapist who specialised in binge eating disorder that I hired for one session in every group. It always ended up being one of the favourite sessions.

I said goodbye while encouraging them to spend the week before our next session really assessing which foods they deemed as bad and using the tools we'd talked about turning those thoughts around.