Want a joyful, connected relationship with food?
I love Deena’s approach, and in this chat I spoke to her about how to process our own relationships with food, how to not project them onto our children, as well as about diet culture, anti-fat bias, whether food is really neutral and how to partner with our children around food. I am ALL for making food a joyful and connected experience, rather than one full of restriction, arbitrary rules and moral judgments! Who isn’t?A bit about Deena: Deena Barselah is a Holistic and Integrative Health Coach who guides mothers and families all over the world to remove the chore from food and cultivate a more joyful, connected, easier, and confident relationship with food. She's supported her own disordered eating, autoimmune conditions, and chronic digestive distress with gentle shifts in diet, habits, nervous system healing, and truly learning how to trust her body. Deena believes there's no one-size-fits-all to food and that by cultivating a system that works well for your unique body and family, you can let go of the "shoulds" that weigh you down. She lives in Encinitas, CA with her husband and son. Previously, Deena worked in the corporate world in areas of Organizational Psychology and People Development. You can find Deena at her website, or on instagram (She is currently on an IG hiatus, but her account is still full of helpful, informative content!)NOTE: You can read a transcript of this interview below, but please bear in mind I don’t edit the transcript and so it won’t always be accurate!Hi, I'm here today with Deena Barselah.And I'm super excited about this conversation because we've been we've been waiting a while to make it happen.And yeah, I'm just gonna let Deena say a little bit about who she is, what she does and how she came to do this work.Great, thank you so much for having me.This is like long overdue, and I'm so glad to be here.So yes, I live in Encinitas, California, Southern California with my husband and my eight-year-old son.And we are a homeschooling, unschooling, whatever label you want to apply type of family.And I am a certified holistic health coach and I've been working in integrative health coaching for almost 14 years now.And my journey to that really started in early childhood where I grew up.I'm 43 years old, so I grew up in the 80s and 90s.with every woman around me, either very distinctly being on a diet or off a diet.And when I say distinctly, it was very clear whether they were, you know, off the plan, kind of cheating, not paying attention to what they should be like all of those strong, all of those words and sentiments, feelings is what I grew up with.And then or they were on a diet and they were being really strict and talking about what they couldn't eat and what they shouldn't eat.And it was never to I'd like to be really clear that this was never put on me explicitly, where I know that that is the case for a lot of people.But as a very highly sensitive, deep feeling person, very aware of the feelings of everybody around me, and that's just how I came into the world and the kind of like a hyper vigilant,I get that there's a place for me to just not rock the boat and make people happy and be the good girl.That's how I came into this world and with different things going on in my family.And so as that person, I also was very attuned.To all the language and all the feelings around food.And it was just, you know, it was every, it was my mom, my mom's friends, my friend's moms, my teachers.It was literally every woman was talking about it this way.And that's how I grew up.And then as I, like I said, as a very highly sensitive person.Not really having a great outlet, or I should say like the way we talk about it in parenting today, like a productive and, you know, true to me, outlet for my emotions, they were stored and food became a really great way for me to, you know, food was a tool for me to fill myself up to channel those emotions.And in my and we, you know, I'm sure we'll get into thisBut into my teenage years, I developed disordered eating and then an eating disorder of bulimia.So I would binge my food, I would eat and any oftentimes when I ate, then I purged my food, or I would binge and then purge.And that went on for a really long time that went on for almost two decades.So, and intermingled in there was just a lot of other disordered eating patterns and that being very normal in the culture we lived in and going on and off diets, you know, today that might look like going on and off cleanses, on and off dietary protocols.And I also had a lot of health stuff.So I had chronic digestive issues, and I got sick a lot.And I felt really tired.And I had a lot of hormonal dysregulation, and polycystic ovarian syndrome, and thyroid issues, and all these different things that came about through my 20s.And I started leaning towards more of an integrative health model, I started realizing just the way that like, one doctor for each part of my body was not serving me.And so I wasembracing more of that.And through that, I started to learn more about holistic health, which felt like a great thing, given my history for me to really grab on to as a way to support my body.And so that continued to take me on a journey through my 20s.And I started to work with a health coach, who introduced me to some concepts around mindful eating around eating psychology aroundWhy I had some of the food behaviors I had.And slowly, slowly, I started to integrate these different things, started to open my world.You know, I should also say that I grew up in a completely conventional health.world.There was no term like nothing.Nobody talked about nutrition or wellness.It was low fat, low calorie diet.Those are the only words that were used around food, but nothing around like the body's wisdom or why I why I was feeling what I was feeling that I live in one whole body that has hearts and systems that speak to each other.Nobody said anything about that.So it was I was very like eyes wide open to that world.And thenI became a holistic health coach myself, because I was so drawn to it.And at the time, I was working in the corporate world.And that felt like such a wonderful way to support myself.And then I support started supporting clients.And back when I first started supporting clients, it was a lot aroundeat this, not that, because admittedly, at that time, I was really glad to move away from the diet world of like Weight Watchers and South Beach and all the different diets to lose weight and more around what people call like, but it's a lifestyle.It's not a diet, you know, those words.And so that was, that was how I supported clients early on.I would I was living in New York City at the time and I would take clients on store tours where I would be like, you know, this is good for you to buy.This is better.Let's look at ingredients.Let's clean out your kitchen.Let's take out all the, you know, all the non real food.You know, that was the way I worked.And over all these past14 years of coaching clients, mostly women around the world.What I have seen is that until we are really getting to the root, and I saw this for me mirrored big time, until we understand more about why we're drawn to certain foods and understand our behaviors around foods more, understand how they're related to past stories, trauma, hypervigilance,You know, different nervous system states, and we really integrate all of that.The food is more of a detail, but also it can be a really important detail.So there's room to hold both of those.And that's, that's where I am now.So now I coach mostly mothers, but I love working with couples and I love working, you know, with the, it's the full family picture of how do we, ourselves,Have a positive, confident, and embodied relationship with food?And how do we support our children in doing the same?Knowing that our bodies will change many times in our lives.The food we eat will change many times in our lives.So how do we lay that f… This is a public episode. 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