How I Found My Food Voice

I want to share with you all how I found my food voice. I grew up in a foodie family, cooking and food was our language – but there was always those tricky diet culture undertones. No one ever explicitly told me that I needed to diet, but the messages were clear, and no one stopped me when I started experimenting with fad diets. 

Over time the diet culture messaging won out over the joys and creativity of cooking and I became subsumed with calorie counting, and binge eating. I started using cooking and eating as a method of control and punishment – methodically spending hours (and so much mental energy) planning meals for the week so that they fit within my arbitrary restrictions that I had created for myself and then all Sunday cooking. The problem was that I was cooking food I wasn’t excited about. Creativity and joy were replaced with punishment and control and that’s what cooking became for me for a long time. 

Fast forward to about 7 years ago, when I was in graduate school. I’m not even sure what exactly shifted in my mind around diets. Maybe it was over a decade of trying and failing to be smaller, but a combination of finding podcasts like She’s All Fat and Find Your Food Voice, lead me down the best rabbit hole – learning about health at every size, intuitive eating, and fat liberation, and living a diet free life. I was lucky that my partner, and some close friends at the time were extremely supportive as I navigated what these new frameworks would look like for me. 

I started to experiment in the kitchen again, and started trying to give myself unconditional permission to eat whatever my body was asking for. I took these things that I had come to believe and was advocating for in others, that fat bodies are entitled to and worthy of respect and love, — overtime, I was able to believe those same things about myself.

Thinking about why I love cooking, that isn’t just about the food – its a creative outlet, a way to care for people in my life, a way to slow down and connect to myself, mentally and physically, and that made it a little less scary to step into the kitchen without a ridged to do list of meal prep tasks.

And while this may sound like a cookie cutter, easy tale, it was anything but. The road was messy, and full of setbacks but overtime, the voice in my head telling me to diet, and that I wasn’t worthy until I was in a smaller body, got quieter and quieter and it became easier and easier to not assign a moral value to food.

Join my diet free cooking classes, work with me one on one to build your confidence in the kitchen, or let me cook with you. In these small ways I want to build a world where food doesn’t exist as a means to punish ourselves but as a way to connect, enjoy, and share stories.