The very act of eating can be so pleasurable. It’s one of our only opportunities multiple times a day to bring a little bit of pleasure, fun, or joy into our day on a regular basis. When we nourish our bodies with what they need, we feel so much better. We have the energy it takes to look after our kids, to crush it at work, or just to feel good in our skin.

As my community has grown, one of the things I feel acutely is that we must be very careful about how we share nutrition information online.
 
We have no idea what someone’s background is, what their current relationship with food and their body is. And even providing what some health professionals might think is innocuous nutrition information can be truly damaging for people.
 
That’s why my core philosophy is to practice what I call “positive nutrition.” And that’s not just to be like, “Yay! Food is awesome!” (because it is!) but it’s that I would much rather focus on what to eat more of than what not to eat.
 
[Most nutrition advice] utterly forgets that our body is literally built of the nutrients we ingest, so we are made of what we do eat—not what we don’t eat!
 
I would much rather encourage people to eat more plants because that’s something that anyone can do, whether they’re an omnivore or a vegan. Everybody can eat more plants!
 
I want to talk about nutrients and what they do in the body.
 
I try to avoid topics that many people have value judgements on, such as calories, because calories don’t really tell us much of anything about the nutrient density of food.
 
If we think of calories and what they truly are, they’re a measure of energy. When we put calories in our body, we are giving our body energy. But there’s so much wrapped in this idea of calorie counting. (Is this too many calories? Not enough calories?).
 
I would much rather just take that whole conversation off the table.
 
And instead, be like, “Hey, here’s fibre. Fibre is really cool because it helps to regulate your digestion. It helps to feed the gut microbiome.”  Because people don’t have a value judgement about fibre.
It’s the same thing with iron. We can all agree that iron is a good thing because you make red blood cells out of it and that’s pretty important!
 
I would rather talk about what matters most in nutrition—which is simply making sure your body gets what it needs.
 
[Your body] knows how to do everything. You don’t need detoxes. You don’t need wacky diet schemes. You just put the nutrition in, and your body will do its thing!

In our culture, much of what we think of as regular, healthy eating and nutrition is very much about diet culture. And there’s so much that we have to unpack about our own beliefs about nutrition.
 
Nutrition is just meant to be a tool to help you live well.
It’s not supposed to be your full-time job. (Unless it is your full-time job!) But for everyone else, it’s not. So, I love the power of simple swaps that dramatically impact your nutrition.
 
If someone just takes a regular sandwich bread and they switch to sprouted grain bread, they get more fibre, more protein, and more minerals—without actually changing how they eat.
 
And I love any time I can give people those tools because we only have so much energy to make change and think about how we eat.

[Some people have so] much tension and perhaps fear over making the wrong decision [about what they eat].
 
And sometimes the role of a dietitian is to just say, “You know what? It’s okay. Maybe you should go out for an ice cream every once in a while.” Or “It’s okay to go to a restaurant where maybe you don’t have control over what you’re eating.”
 
Sometimes I feel like there are two camps: the people who just don’t think about nutrition at all, and the people who think about it far too much. And you’re always trying to strike that beautiful—and sometimes hard to achieve—middle ground.
 
Health is a very holistic process. And I think the other thing that’s so important to realize is that health is not a destination.
 
It’s not like, “Oh, if I do all of these things right, I will arrive at health and it just stops, right?”
 
Health is something that we practice every single day. It’s realizing that we’re not energized, so maybe we have a 3:00 PM green smoothie to help get our energy up. Or realizing we’ve been working too much, and so we choose to go to bed an hour earlier for the next few nights.
 
It is about being in your body, saying, “What do I need right now?” And adjusting accordingly.