Finding Johanna

I can be very type A - I often display perfectionist behaviors. I have spent most of my life trying to lose weight to gain praise, approval, and validation and achieve perfection.  We’re fed the image of the perfect woman and when we don’t match that (*spoiler alert: we never will) we feel completely inadequate. I engaged the type A perfectionist traits towards my food and fitness to control my life and ultimately the size of my body. I would obsess over making lists and meal prepping and having a certain goal of mileage to run for the week or amount of time I had to spend in the gym. I had to have a perfect plate and a perfect fitness routine.  The productivity narrative is really impossible to achieve. You don’t have to hustle for worthiness or complete a long to do list of shoulds to prove you’re  worthy. You don’t have to do more or be more you can just be! The constant to-do list that I had around my food and fitness all for the sake of weight-loss seemed to give me control and ma

I finally realized that in order for me to fully recover my mental health I have to heal my relationship to food and admit that after a while I was suffering from Orthorexia and had seriously disordered eating and it was completely because of Whole30. Whole 30  is perpetuating the diet cycle and making people’s relationship with food worse. The way many people are using the program is just another excuse to yo-yo diet, binge eat, and it perpetuates the attachment of morality to food and continues the shame spiral. A lot of whole 30 marketing states that “it’s not a diet it’s a lifestyle change” and “it’s a 30 day elimination protocol and is not supposed to be done forever.” BUT the book specifically states that you can continue longer than the 30 days if your body needs more time in the elimination phase. It’s turning into a lifestyle change that people are trying to adhere to forever, doing Whole100’s, Whole365’s, or doing a Whole30 multiple times a year. I think I completed a Whole16