In most societies, food that one takes is governed by the diet culture, rules, and the like. People remain restrictive as regards foods. They do not want to embrace good foods.
This leads to unhealthiness. Food freedom is freeing oneself of these traditional bonds and adopting a wholesome and balanced diet that makes us happy.
Food freedom
The term Food freedom implies giving up the restrictions of culture as regards food and adopting a balanced lifestyle. It means food security in terms of growing your own foods.
It challenges the societal norms on eating and body image. But food freedom is not just this. It is a more complex term that includes:
-freedom from industrial food production
-ways to strengthen food sovereignty
-understanding the history of local eating and dieting habits and how they influence the population health
-overcoming food addiction
-liberating oneself to adopt outside the diet culture and eat everything in moderation.
Food freedom embraces all body sizes (Source: Beyond Fit)So you can enjoy all types of foods with no reigns holding you back. Guilt should be absent from eating. The approach towards and relationship with food should be positive with no judgement or strings attached.
It is intuitive and mindful eating. You do not allow unnecessary restrictions to come near your food and enjoy it to your heart’s content. Thus you cultivate a trust in self and gain confidence.
Benefits of this freedom from food
These restrictions linked to food once overcome have a good effect on the body. It aids in overcoming the eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia, and depression-related overeating.
Using one’s intuition and mind while eating has a positive impact on body. The control of diet culture gets out of the way of eating. You are free to choose what you like to eat.
You switch to considering the health aspects of food. Therefore, you start giving importance to the food composition and amount of carbs, fats, proteins and other essential nutrients in it.
And you can easily lose the excess flab to achieve the desired weight without affecting your body negatively. You can come in shape in a healthy way.
Eat with no guilt (Source: Popsugar)You are protected from getting food-related disorders and purging problems. Your body image ideas improve and you embrace your body size well with no feelings of guilt.
You break societal norms and replace them with what you think is right. This makes you happy. You start enjoying life and living it to the full.
The origin of this concept
There are a lot of ideals linked to body size especially in the film world. The thin ideal was favored and people with plus body size were being ridiculed.
This affected the latter mentally and was the root cause of eating disorders. Diets made an entry and soon became a multi-billion dollar industry.
Most of these diets were unhealthy and though they helped lose weight, the weight was not maintained.
Most of these chronic dieters regained weight in a few years and 33% of them had a weight that was more than what they started with. Thus the benefits was going to the companies but patients got no proper benefits.
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Freedom from diet culture (Source: Healthy Girls kitchen)Hence this concept of food freedom originated. This involves behavior change. It emphasizes positive body image and healthy eating attitudes. It ditches the dietary restrictions.
And most importantly, it removes the feelings of guilt and shame following eating of forbidden foods. Thus it overcomes all negative feelings and makes a person happy. The origin is in the Buddhist practice of mindfulness.