DIET


attached to. For instance, do you feel anxious and off-kilter when you go out with friends and can’t find something that’s 100% ‘clean’? You’re on a diet, baby! (Full respect here is given to those individuals with genuine food allergies and intolerances.) I know that writing this is going to piss


some people off. But if I can prevent just one more confused, health-conscious woman (and increasingly, man) from being more deeply sucked into diet culture, then it’s worth it.


WHAT IS DIET CULTURE? In the words of Fiona Sutherland, non- diet dietitian and mindfulness crusader: “Diet culture encompasses all the


Om, should I eat this?


There is a growing – and alarming – trend of yoga teachers giving potentially harmful dietary advice to their students.


by Casey Conroy


[Editor’s note: while many readers will not be yoga teachers, of course, we feel this is useful information for many of us to consider from our own perspective. We can consider where it applies to our own lives, or even simply in terms of how we view and treat our bodies. It might also apply to; teachers, health care practitioners, and students in other fields.]


Y


oga teachers are trusted professionals, trained in the body, and often the first port of


call for a student’s health issues. Often yoga teachers are asked health and nutrition-related questions requiring individualised attention. Whilst many


38 APRIL 2017


teachers will refer on, there is a growing – and alarming – trend of yoga teachers giving potentially harmful dietary advice to their students. I write this as a yoga teacher, and as


a yoga student. I write this as a dietitian and nutritionist who sees the women and girls in clinic at the back end of yet another gruelling 10-day juice fast, or another winter freezing through raw foods; their thyroid, adrenals, and/or reproductive health a bit more depleted. Their relationship with food and their body having slid backwards into more disordered and dangerous territory. Their self-confidence more bruised. Some of these people are yoga teachers themselves. I have been on both the giving and


receiving end of bad nutritional advice from yoga teachers. I write this with deep remorse for any past student to whom I may have passed on potentially harmful nutrition advice before I learnt more about diet culture. I’m sorry. I didn’t know that diet culture, and the body hatred and dysfunction around food it creates, was such an insidious and widespread problem. I didn’t know that ‘clean eating’ –


when taking to the extreme – is just another code word for dieting. ‘Dieting’ is any way of eating you are emotionally


messages that tell us that we’re not good enough in the bodies we have, and we’d be more worthwhile and valuable if our bodies were different. Our culture is so embedded with body and weight- centric messages that they’re sometimes imperceptible. Diet culture is deeply ingrained in our everyday existence and prevents us from living our most full and meaningful lives.” There’s health-conscious, and


then there’s health-obsessed. And increasingly, I see more and more yogis, especially younger women, crossing over into health-obsessed territory. I know what it looks like because I’ve been there. I think that as yoga teachers we need to be vigilant with this, and to be very careful about the health advice we give outside of our specialty of yoga practice.


STORIES OF TWO WOMEN To illustrate why it’s so inappropriate for yoga teachers to give detailed nutrition advice, I’ll tell two short stories.


SCENE 1 Picture this: I’m wrapping up a nutrition consultation with a client, Ms X. As her dietitian we’ve discussed lots of stuff about food, body cues of hunger and fullness, digestion – y’know, that sort of thing. What we haven’t discussed is the


vertebral stress fracture in her neck and the inflamed tendons in her wrists, because she has other health


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