Confessions of a Health Coach
"Guilty" pleasures, body image - and a yoga practice for the sacral chakra
I have a confession:
I enjoyed some Krispy Krunchy fried chicken tenders this weekend. Yes, the kind you find under the heat lamp at Circle K. I bought them while still in my yoga pants after teaching my sixth class of the week. And I didn’t feel bad about it.
If you’ve been following this Substack for the last couple months, you may have noticed that my Friday food posts tend toward whole, minimally-processed ingredients - heavy on the vegetables and fiber, low on the animal products, sugar, salt, and saturated fat. Reasonable people can disagree about the parameters of the optimal human diet, but after 44 years of experimentation, I have a pretty good sense about what works best in my body. Peanut M&M’s and red wine, much to my dismay, don’t do anything nice for me at all. Kale and chia seeds? Much happier belly. At the same time, I love food. I’ve fantasized, from time to time, about being one of those people who eats only to survive or to fuel. For better or for worse, that’s never going to be me long-term: I love to eat food, I love to cook, and I love to serve delicious meals to others. Fiber and micronutrients are important, but it is just as important to me that what I put into my body is delicious - dare I say pleasurable.
And yet: My relationship with food and my body - like so many people - hasn’t always been a friendly one.
In high school, along with Light on Yoga, I discovered a cache of vintage diet books in the attic - Beverly Hills (just eat fruit!); Atkins (just eat meat!); Fit for Life (eat fruit for breakfast; combine fat with carbs or fat with meat but NEVER meat with carbs!) By the time I discovered Dean Ornish’s Eat More, Weigh Less, it seemed absolutely scientific and reasonable. I became vegan - and also, seriously dietary fat-phobic. In the first picture above, taken at summer camp when I was 15, I had just gained a couple pounds, up from my low of 102. That number was infinitely frustrating to me: I was desperate to get into the double-digits (I am very glad that never worked out.)
In the second picture, closer to high school graduation just about two years later, I’d gained about forty pounds, alternating days of only apples with midnight binges on bags of chocolate chips.
We’ll skip a few years of back-and-forth here, including a really fun time in my early twenties when I discovered that if I wanted to maintain my weight I could either continue eating, or drinking, but not both, so some days I somehow lived on pickles and beer while holding down a respectable grown-up job. That sure was a lifestyle choice. Not surprisingly, my weight during this period ping-ponged back and forth, sometimes by as much as twenty pounds each year.
In 2013, after moving to Arizona, I started racing triathlons - first Olympic distance, then half-Ironmans, a couple marathons, a century ride, and finally an Ironman in 2019. At the time, I felt like I’d finally worked into a healthy relationship with my body. I discovered what it felt like to let my hunger and nutritional needs be my guide, and dramatically cut back on drinking to preserve early-morning training session focus.
And yet. While I may have had diet and exercise dialed in, other areas of my life perhaps inevitably slipped out of balance. There’s a long-running endurance athletics “joke” that goes something like: if you’re still married, you’re not training hard enough. Thanks be, apparently I didn’t train hard enough (also, my husband is one of the world’s most patient and supportive humans.)
During yoga teacher training in 2022, things finally started to pull into better balance - although, as all things, I’m a definite work-in-progress. Something one of my teachers said then has stuck with me: when you are finally living in alignment, your addictions quit you. As I paid more mindful attention to my food, movement, and relationship habits, the places of imbalance, of inconsistency, grew clearer. I (mostly) stopped wanting the magic trick that would get me to my 124-pound “ideal” weight, instead asking myself “what choice will best support the life I want?”
These days (see the last three pictures above), although ads on my social media continue to target people just like me who “only need to lose 10 pounds”, which can be delivered via a few painless GLP-1 injections, for everything in their life to be perfect, I happily allow my weight to vary about ten pounds up or down depending on season and circumstance. I remember with fondness a former supervisor and ex-model who even in middle age and deep within the federal bureaucracy still wore absurd stilletto heels and strode around the office with the focus of a runway walk, who liked to say, in her delightful Tennessee accent: “anyone who does not gain at least five pounds over the holidays IS A COMMUNIST.”
Which brings us back to that fried chicken. I’ve been spending some time lately trying to figure out what my “favorite” food is, and I have a little bad news: it might actually, honestly, be kale. The foods I love are mostly the ones that balance tasting good, making my digestive system happy, and nourishing me for the long haul. A few of my favorite things: bitter greens; winter squash; oat groats; cocoa-and-maca smoothies. Knowing that our health is determined by a complex mix of genetics, social determinants, environment, behaviors, and that no single food choice determines our long-term well-being, there are moments where certain “un-healthy” things just hit. For me, those guilty pleasures include fried chicken, diet (yes, diet! I know) Mountain Dew (very on-brand for a West Virginian), and Popcorners (a snack that pretends to be healthy only to persuade you to eat the whole bag.)
This week’s posts share a casual thematic link to the sacral chakra, the energy center connected to creativity, fluidity, connection, and pleasure. I’m not exactly saying that a little hip-opening yoga practice followed by an indulgent snack of your choice, enjoyed thoroughly and without guilt, is the solution to all of life’s problems - but a little balanced pleasure-seeking just might help your day feel more open, expansive, and joyful.
Below: 20-minute yoga practice focused on hip mobility and fluid motion + audio version of this post.