I am a dietetic intern on the track to become a registered dietitian and get my MS in clinical nutrition at NYU. Far cry from being a ballet dancer in career number 1, right?
Wrong.
My career progression has actually fallen together beautifully. At first, I really wasn't sure why I had this plan. I knew I had had some serious issues with food for the first 25 years of my life and that I had overcome them. I knew that my mother's death was excessively correlated with her lack of self-care and morbid obesity. I also knew that, if the dancer thing hadn't work out, I would have gone to school to become an OB/GYN and help life start everyday and women to show themselves love and care.
But I did get to dance and I did need a lot of help getting myself into a place where food and eating and health and wellness and self-love were as paramount as they need to be.
I'm paying it forward.
I can't think of a better place to work to help people's lives to be amazing.
The concept I work from is the idea that food is love. I work with people who are suffering severely with lack of love in this department and people who are push and pull and fighting the fight against letting love happen.
I see it this way:
every person who doesn't enjoy eating at every moment suffers from an eating disorder.
Obviously, our minds travel to that image where some one's life revolves around 6000 calorie days with 65 trips to the bathroom, esophageal damage, teeth rotting, and a propensity to cut themselves; or the woman on the bus who you mistake for a five year old when you see her from behind and you shudder at the site when she stands and you see she's 40 years old and weighs 75 lbs.
That's not what I'm talking about.
I do treat these people. And you know what? (and I don't state this is defense of my former self)
Every person I have met is absolutely amazing. Driven, caring, successful, effective, kind, with a side of them that is so exceptionally full of life, like children, almost.
They share one problem, not fault, not negative quality, not reason for contempt. Just a problem, a faulty wire, perhaps.
A faulty wire that's expanded to effect every light in the building.
They don't love themselves.
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
It's a concept that illustrates breathing, water, homeostasis, excretion, sex, sleep and food as the physiological, most basis needs of human life.
Then there's safety and security, love/belonging, esteem, and finally, self-actualization.
I'm gonna tear this apart right now. Let's start at the top.
Self actualization
Essentially self-actualized people are rad.
They don't judge anything...not the world, not the people in it, and, most importantly (to further my soapbox order of the day), they don't judge themselves.
They are creative, have an established set of morals and beliefs that they structure their lives around.
The can be spontaneous.
They don't second guess and they are accepting: the facts, the realities, and just the way things are.
They just accept them, without complaint, without opinion, without self-harm or punishment for things not being the way they would like them to be.
They just are.
Pretty amazing right?
EXCEPT...part of the whole Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is that one cannot even begin to achieve the highest level of the pyramid unless ALL of the prior needs are met.
So your friend who's totally blaze and seems to Tai Chi let it all wash over and is all into art and community and education and travel etc etc etc, but doesn't actually take care of himself -- i.e. drinks too much, sleeps too little, procrastinates at times, overdoes it at others, is late...these are all prior developments that need to be addressed.
In reality, your friend is pretentious and selfish.
HUGE difference.
Moving along...
Self-esteem
Now, I can champion this one. If you are not in absolute love with yourself, you are not going to be able to give yourself to others. You are not going to trust people. You are not going to be free of all the worries and stories and off-putting principles you've created about every type of interaction.
You just have to love all those things.
It's a quick jump into acceptance and actualization when that's achieved.
So you're thinking about yourself and people you know. That friend who always looks good and always gets the job and can talk to anyone and everyone and seems to just be?
She has a voice in her head.
That voice is telling her all the things that your voice tells you, maybe even worse. One of two things are happening...She's either learned to accept the voice and shrug it off/go beyond it, or, more likely, she's in outright defiance.
The latter does not breed happiness, let me tell ya.
Love/Belonging
Everybody blames everything on their parents. It's the basis of an entire psychological healing profession. It's the reality that supersedes all actions. Hell, it EXCUSES us for how we are.
A new point of view:
Actually, they love you and you love them.
No one is perfect, living by the direction of that voice that's gibber-jabbering day in and day out will make us screw up.
You can not STOP hearing that negative, that questioning, that self-loathing.
You just can not stop that.
Sorry.
It's going to be there.
You just have to realize that a greater force is in you and SHOULD trump that not so great stuff.
It's a fact that you love.
We all love. Everybody cares and is unbelievably attracted to intimacy and really being with and knowing and feeling safe with other people.
We are not loners. Not a single one of us. We are completely in need of connecting.
So, when your boyfriend tells you he's not interested in the ballet and he thinks you talk to much, well, you just say to yourself we need to talk this out, see what's really going on, and come back at him thinking: man, i love this guy. Period.
Isn't it strange that as I write about more and more basic things, it starts to sound a lot more difficult?
Safety.
This one seems like a no brainer. But you don't trust anyone, really, so no it's not...AT ALL.
The extreme version of this one is explained like this:
Homeless people are totally messing up their lives. Obviously they can't even get shelter, so they are totally screwed (I will remind you of your nodding right now when we get back to the basics).
So you have a home. Your finances may even be in order (by the way, in order to achieve this level, finances are not a worry. I don't mean you're Wall Street King of the Thing, Money-bags McGee...he's 99% of the time insanely unhappy anyway) I mean you just know you have a job, you have support, if you need more money, you will get it. You will do what you have to do.
What the f...Audrey, you're writing cockamamie shit right now.
That is NOT possible.
Reminder: we are in the 2nd level of needs. The one where we are safe. The one before we can trust other people and love ourselves and others fully. Gonna have to get on that...
And this one I have to present from a different angle:
There's a homeless guy who sleeps in a doorway between 87th and 88th on Lexington. He has a buddy with him who shouts at 6 am (When I get uptown for works) and says "GET UP IT'S TIME TO START!!!!!". Every day, he sits and smiles. People give him food, he gets money to buy what he has decided he needs. He has a great friend who encourages him to keep up. He loves him and trusts him to be there for him.
I gave him bright pink socks one day. He asked if I'd buy him socks because his feet were freezing.
I had Pilates socks in my bag. Warm, thick, with the sticky stuff on the bottom so i don't slip, fluorescent pink.
I gave them to him.
Next time I saw him...huge grin, showing off his sweet foot gear.
He wasn't and isn't embarrassed.
He is appreciative and happy.
Who's actualized?
And onto my point...
Physiological needs
Basically, it goes like this:
1. If you can't breathe for something like 3 minutes, you die.
2. If you don't have water for something like a week, you die.
3. If your body is not doing what it is supposed to, you get sick and possibly die.
4. If you don't sleep, you might as well be dead because you're living like a zombie.
5. If you don't have sex...well, I can speak for this one, you pretty much feel dead on the inside because you just have to get laid.
and...
6. 30 days tops without food...you die.
Now I could go through each of these less dramatically, but I'm going to push my foodie point.
Eating is a basic physiological need. It trumps an amazing amount of other parts of living and being and the things people put first in their days, weeks, months, and years.
If you're messing with food, you have some serious issues.
I mean this.
If you skip breakfast because you have a big business lunch-in and you don't want to eat too much today: Serious issue.
If you start feeling guilty WHILE you're eating fudge (by the way, what the hell?), or after you eat it well, you've got serious issues.
If you eat when you're sad: serious issues.
If you binge and purge: serious issues.
If you look in the mirror and take yourself apart and inevitably say "I need to be on a diet": SERIOUS ISSUES.
Food is love.
and it's delicious.
God gave us an amazing gift when He gave us the ability to taste, to savor, and enjoy.
He did not intend for us to say, thank you God for Haagen Daaz, I will now run 4 extra miles.
He did not intend for us to say, "hmm, i have 5 bucks for lunch and I feel like shit today...McDonald's: dadadadada I'm loving it."
He did not intend low-carb, low-fat, Atkins, sugar substitutes, convenience foods, preservatives and packaging, eating on the subway, while walking to the office, skipping lunch because work is piling up and that's more important.
ERROR.
WRONG..YOU are more important.
Love yourself.
Feed yourself.
Be good to your body.
Accept it.
Feel HAPPY when you eat.
Like what you are eating.
Share it with others.
That's just step one.
I love my job.
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