Today, I did something I would never have done a few years ago: I ate Dim Sum. Now, you might be thinking eating Dim Sum isn’t a life-changing event, but for me, it is. My relationship with food has evolved so much in recent years, and food that I labelled as "bad," I am now able to enjoy guilt-free. Like many girls, my obsession with food began in my teens when I noticed my friends starting to categorise certain foods as good and bad based on how ‘fat’ they might make us. Obviously, we had no clue about nutrition and were basing our choices on what the media was telling us. I remember going through a short-lived phase in my mid-teens where I would replace a meal with one of those horrible meal-replacing shakes they used to tout on TV.
For as long as I can remember, my mum has been on a diet, constantly trying the latest thing in a desperate bid to lose weight. For us millennials growing up, we didn’t have much body positivity messaging, and commercials still used degrading tactics to make women feel less than. I spent my teens looking in the mirror, making sure I didn’t have any cellulite, and scrutinising my body for not looking how I was told it ‘should’ look. This was normal, and everyone around me was doing the same. I have known diet culture and I have known how to categorise foods as good or bad based on what I was consuming at the time. This has led to an interesting relationship with food.
This relationship with food started to become more of an obsession when I went through a health scare at 21. I was dating a guy at the time whose mother had turned to food, nutrition, and holistic medicine to cure various ailments, thus my entry into the wellness industry. Overnight, I changed my diet—replacing margarine with organic butter, seed oils with coconut oil, and my morning coffee with bone broth—and it worked. I started to get better. I stopped drinking and felt empowered around my health. I stopped ‘dieting,’ and I had never looked or felt physically better.
I then moved to Thailand and was introduced to the concept of veganism by someone I met there. Instead of bone broths, they were all about high carb, low fat—no oils, no salt, and ‘raw till 4,’ meaning you ate only raw foods until 4pm. This started what I now know as orthorexia, an obsession with eating healthy food. For years, I lived by these principles: only eating raw foods, smoothies, fruits, and salads until 4pm, then consuming copious carbs like rice and potatoes at night. Again, I physically looked incredibly fit and felt healthy, so I didn’t see what was happening. I wouldn’t eat out, scared of the food I would be served. I wouldn’t let people cook for me, afraid they would sneak in oils or salt.
I remember going to my father’s birthday dinner and ordering six fresh-squeezed orange juices because I wasn’t sure they could cook food in a ‘safe’ way for me. When that wasn’t enough, I turned to monomeals—the practice of only eating one fruit or vegetable at each meal. As I was still living in Thailand, it was easy for me to have six mangoes for breakfast, two kilos of mangosteen for lunch, and a couple of papayas for dinner. I became a fruitarian, albeit briefly, and the deeper I went, the more I was villainising food under the guise of ‘health.’
When I left Thailand and moved to the UK, I was still trying to live a high-raw life, and it was actually a friend and colleague who said to me, “It’s impossible to live in such a cold country and continue to eat mainly raw.” I fought this for months, and finally, in the peak of winter, I ate some porridge for breakfast instead of a smoothie, and it was incredible. Slowly, I started to introduce cooked foods again, and over time, I began to find a more balanced way of eating—or so I thought. Whilst I started to let some foods in, I remained plant-based and stayed away from oils, salt, gluten, and refined sugar as if my life depended on it.
I went on a trip to Italy with my mum and her friend, and whilst they were enjoying pasta, pastries, and bread, I was eating bags of cherries and plain potatoes. Thinking about this now makes me so sad. If there’s any place in the world you should indulge in gluten, it’s Italy.
When Ben and I started dating three years ago, I was eating gluten and small amounts of refined sugar, yet I used to monitor the amount of oil and salt he was using. I can’t imagine how irritating that must have been. Here he was, trying to cook me a delicious meal, and I was fretting over the salt and oil quantity—more concerned with that than being grateful for the love he was pouring into our food. I was still trapped, even though I thought I was free, as if letting some gluten and refined sugars into my life was somehow a representation of me ‘letting my hair down.’
I thought I was connected to my body and giving it what it needed when really, I was still confined by what I thought was ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ no different from when I was a teenager, just in a different form. We’ve been together for three years now, and whilst I owe him a lot, one of the biggest things I owe him is the freedom I now have with food. Through his gentle encouragement and enquiries, I have loosened the hold food has had over me for so long, and I now feel like I have found what I call a healthy balance.
Instead of resisting the information my body has been giving me, I have started to listen and try things I never thought in a million years I would eat. It started with organic eggs and line-caught fish. It now includes organic chicken, organic butter, and even once during my pregnancy, a grass-fed beef burger. Ben and pregnancy have been my greatest teachers in reminding me that food gets to be fun. You can buy and cook organic food at home but go out and enjoy Dim Sum every now and again. You can go to Denmark and eat cardamom pastries for breakfast and still be considered a wellness girly. You can dust your pasta in parmesan and not beat yourself up for it afterwards. You can go to Italy and eat the pasta—which we lovingly did for three delicious weeks last year. I am so happy I got to rewrite that story because so much of Italy is translated through their love of food.
This is why eating Dim Sum was a beautiful ceremony for me today. Not only did I eat the Dim Sum guilt-free, but I also got to share it with one of my closest friends. Food is no longer a category for me—it is a feeling, an intuitive dialogue that gets to be explored instead of denied. The irony is that I am still the same size I was when I was only eating fruit. I am the same fit and healthy person, but with a far happier relationship with food. I look in the mirror and I love what I see. I no longer feel guilt or punish myself for eating things that would have previously sent me into a spiral. I still call myself a wellness girly, and I eat for both pleasure and nutrition. I no longer live by labels, instead I live by intuition.
I guess this is the balance I wish all women had with food and their bodies. I am grateful I have landed here because, at 36, for the first time in years, I get to enjoy my cake and eat it too.