Why is nutrition like a row boat? 🛶
One of my favourite analogies for intuitive nutrition is the row boat analogy by Dr Rick Kausman, author of ‘If not dieting, then what?’
Picture yourself sitting in a row boat. You’ve got a paddle in each hand. One paddle represents your nutrition and self-care knowledge. The other paddle represents your intuition and connection to your body sensations and cues. So nutrition and intuition. Diet culture and society in general is obsessed with nutrition and self-care. And I’d hazard a guess that you have a pretty good knowledge of basic healthy eating principles. But as your nutrition knowledge paddle gets stronger, you may also find yourself confused with all the conflicting nutrition information out there. Do I need to eat clean or keto? Plant-based or paleo? Should I be eating regularly or fasting? It’s enough to make your head spin.
With so much focus on nutrition, it’s easy to lose touch with our intuition. With the whispers and wisdom of the body. Think back to when you were a child. Babies are born intuitive eaters. You would rarely see a baby that doesn’t cry when they’re hungry, or keeps drinking or eating when they’re full. Littlies are so in tune with their body’s needs. One day they may eat a mountain of food, and the next not nearly as much. They take joy in moving their bodies and focus more on what their bodies can DO rather than what they look like. As children grow, sadly they often lose this connection with their body. Children are commonly told to “finish everything on your plate!” Or worse, society tells us that hunger is “bad” and that we should stifle it with water, coffee, chewing gum or appetite suppressant lollipops. Or periods are shameful and something that you should just “put up with” or hide. Over time this connection with our intuition wanes and the arm rowing the paddle gets weaker and we end up rowing ourselves in circles.
Although I am a huge fan of learning about the science of nutrition and debunking diet culture BS, I like to do it alongside strengthening the intuition muscle. Re-connecting with your body’s cues and learning to honour them can be an empowering tool to help guide the nutrition and self-care principles that are right for you and thus propel your row boat forward.
So next time you choose to make a change to your nutrition or self-care, think about how you could tap into your intuition to help guide the change.
Nadia x