I Gave Up My Nutritionist Side Hustle And I Feel Relieved — Here’s Why

If you love something, let it go

While I’m in a good place now, my relationship with food and my body has a troubled history. I was self-conscious of my body in my younger years and felt pressure from the media and peers to mould myself to whatever the beauty standards were at the time, as most of us have done or still do, whether we are consciously aware or not.

By the time I was in my late teens and early twenties, I had orthorexic tendencies. This looked like:

• Obsessing and stressing over eating a perfect, “clean” diet.
• Doing HIIT (high intensity interval training) three days a week running only on bullet coffee (it’s okay, you can roll your eyes, I know better now), on top of getting my ass kicked by a personal trainer one to two times per week, and group fitness classes to fill in the gaps.
• Eating huge salads that, in hindsight, were actually an overkill on fibre.
• Demonizing sugar, and nearly losing sleep and sanity when I ate it, fearing that it was causing some sort of disease.
• Taking questionable supplements with dramatic health claims, that may or may not have damaged my liver. Yikes.
• Watching all the trendy health…