As of this summer, I am changing my nutrition counseling business name from Ideal Feast to Intuitive Feast. To celebrate, I present this website and the blog you are reading right now. Hopefully, this will serve in the years to come as a colorful source of ideas and inspiration for all of our food and body healing journeys. Certainly for me as a person (a nutritionist who also happens to be a person with a body), I find the exercise of writing therapeutic. I hope you enjoy the reading, and I encourage you to do a little writing of your own from time to time!
But why the name change? What’s wrong with Ideal, a word that singsongs along so nicely with the word Feast?
When I first decided on the Ideal Feast business name, it came out of long-ago discussions with friends and family members about the concept of a “perfect” meal, one that both deliciously satisfied every taste bud and provided all the nutrients a body needed. (As if such a thing exists!) I’ve always felt that taste and pleasure from food is just as important as nutrition, and that we sabotage our joy when we choose one without the other. But what I really wanted at that time was to be able to eat whatever I wanted, regardless of access or calories or judgement. I went from person to person in my life, curious to understand, “if you could eat whatever you wanted, with no consequences, what would it be? What do you really want?”
When I asked those questions, I was striving to create visions of abundance and pleasure for the world, but in all honesty, I was also one hot mess of (food) desire. For years prior, I had eaten a beans-and-rice-based diet, gazing at the wines and cheeses in the grocery store with the longing of a child drooling against a candy shop window. I also hated my body. Even though others saw my size as “normal,” I felt shame each time I indulged a craving for rich foods. My favorite dreams were the ones where I could eat anything I wanted in a garden of candy or a palace of pasta.
At first the exercise was healing. To my surprise, not everyone I interviewed listed cake upon pie upon cake for their ideal feasts. Of course there were traditional feast ingredients, like steak and mashed potatoes, soufflé and port, but there were also many visions of foods at the peak of ripeness, rare or fresh. Lists included wild black raspberries off the bush, a green salad rainbow-colored from the summer garden, red romaine still wet with the morning dew. We realized that precious foods like Copper River salmon and mountain huckleberries are just (or sometimes more) desirable than dessert. Some remembered foods important to their heritage, like sauerkraut “made the old way” by grandma in Europe, or mom’s apple pie. Everyone’s feast was completely unique: when freed to imagine, it turns out our bodies (and souls) want a luxurious variety.
I concluded from this exercise that the Ideal Feast was a beautiful thing, a reflection of how, deep down at the core, our bodies want food to be both nourishing and luxurious, richly connected to land, culture, and history as well as biochemical needs, a multi-sensory and deeply satisfying experience. I felt it was natural, beautiful, worth striving for. I loosened some of my food restrictions and started to eat more of what I wanted.
But. I was still at war with myself, because I couldn’t reconcile the idea that eating what I wanted might not create the body of my dreams.
Over the years since, as I have listened more and deeper to the signals my body sends me, and to what makes me comfortable and happy, I have learned that full permission, allowing a feast of different foods in our diet, is amazing and liberating. But it isn’t ideal. Nothing is, or ever could be.
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According to Dictionary.com, the word “ideal” has two definitions. The first sounds ok, if a bit of a tease, “satisfying one’s conception of what is most perfect; most suitable.” But it is the second definition that really brings it home: “existing only in the imagination; desirable or perfect but unlikely to become a reality.” Unlikely to become a reality. Dreams are lovely and I’m certainly a dreamer, but is it really responsible to promise, or even seek, an imagined impossibility for the very real food that we need to eat every day?
No, of course it isn’t. And deciding in advance on some kind of “ideal” way of eating is black and white thinking that comes straight out of diet culture. It is based on the harmful idea that we can control our shape or size by using our brains to outsmart our bodies. In the end, the body always wins.
One of my favorite quotes is the one attributed to Voltaire that says, “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” In the food and body healing I have experienced and witnessed in my clients, a positive experience never means getting to perfection. Instead, it means embracing the real good right in front of us when perfect gets out of the way: the grace in the grey area where bodies can be nourished, soothed, and pleasured, but also suffer want and pain.
In this world, it is not by imagining an Ideal Feast, but by settling into an “Intuitive” one that we are freed.
And so, from here forward, I think Intuitive Feast much better reflects the journey that lies ahead in our work together. It means understanding the vagaries and weirdness of our hunger and our need. It means eating to fuel, and for fun, and when the meal in front of us is a vision of beauty, and when the meal in front of us is a beige pile of “that’ll do.” Seeking an Intuitive Feast means much more listening and much less dreaming: coming down into the body out of the brain and opening to deeper truths. It means looking for pleasure and playing with fantasy, but it also means being with the self that we already are. In my experience, there’s oh so much good buried there.