“Good Intuition: on healing your relationship with food” || Carla Bredin interviewed by Roisin Healy for Irish Country Magazine March / April 2021

24 Feb “Good Intuition: on healing your relationship with food” || Carla Bredin interviewed by Roisin Healy for Irish Country Magazine March / April 2021

Carla was interviewed by roisin healy for irish country magazine for a feature entitled “good intuition: healing your relationship with food and your body can be freeing”. The full piece is available in the mar/apr edition of irish country magazine in shops and online now.

Excerpt:

Most of us would be sceptical of the claims on a detox tea box, and would consider appetite suppressants to be a barbaric idea. But those are merely the overt presentations of diet culture. What can be more problematic are the less obvious ways that diet culture controls is.

Diet culture, if you aren’t aware of the term, is a system of beliefs that convince us that a small body is an ideal body, and that health and happiness cannot be attained while living in a larger body. Not only does this affect our own feelings about our bodies, it is an oppressive belief system that harms everyone. Think of those who feel they have to conform to the ‘ideal’ size. It goes beyond the pain of people making moral judgements about their bodies, or not being able to find clothing in their size. People in larger bodies are often excluded from access to services, products and dignified care. None of that is ok, but dismantling diet culture won’t happen overnight. it has been decades in the making, and its insidious nature means it has permeated into every facet of our culture and daily lives, Nutritionist Carla Bredin explains.

“Diet culture has morphed to become a less-obvious force that fills our headspace and conversations. We’re constantly zoomed in on our ‘flaws’, targeting areas of our bodies as ‘problems’, being sold the cure to these problems in a cream or a supplement or an elimination diet”, Carla says. “it can show up when magazines and TV programmes present us with a singular picture of beauty or wellness with no diversity in the bodies they celebrate. The message is therefore internalised that we don’t fit the preferred picture of health; that we need to try harder; that we didn’t want it bad enough”

If any of this rings true for you, you’re not alone. For so many of us, food is no longer just food, but people are waking up to the torment that diet culture causes. Intuitive eating is gaining traction online, and many people are turning to professionals for support or reading up on the subject. The premise of intuitive eating is relatively simple, Carla explains, but potentially life-changing for those of us who feel trapped in a guilt-ridden relationship with food. “Intuitive eating is being able to eat food without following rules or experiencing distress. That may sound a bit simplistic, particularly is someone has never really experienced the stress of poor body-image and restrictive and punitive behaviours around their food intake”, Carla says. “But for those who have engaged in years, often decades, of dieting, and creating rules that cannot be broken around how you eat, what you eat, when you eat, and trying every way to shrink their bodies, intuitive eating can seem like a near impossible ask”…

The full article is available in the Mar/Apr 2021 edition of Irish Country Magazine, available in shops now and online