Healing Your Relationship with Food with Sheri Glazier
Food is at the center of our celebrations, big and small, especially during the holidays. It’s how we celebrate, connect, pass on traditions, and share our love with others. In this episode, Oklahoma rancher and registered dietitian Sheri Glazier, the Dirt Road Dietitian, joins me to talk about healing our relationships with food, navigating it during the holidays, and how we change the legacy of food for the next generation.
In this episode, we’ll chat about:
The generational impact our parents have on our relationship with food
Reasons restriction may be getting in the way of your long term success
Success tips for navigating food during the holidays
MEET THE DIRT ROAD DIETITIAN
Sheri Glazier, an Oklahoma farmer and registered dietitian, knows a thing or two about creating nutrient-rich meals for her on-the-go family. While she makes coordinating family logistics - on-farm meal deliveries, kids’ schedules - and client consults look seamless, she’s an ordinary mom doing extraordinary things. With a bachelors and masters in nutritional sciences from Oklahoma State University, Sheri uses her education and on-the-job skills as a nutrition consultant, speaker, virtual nutrition coach, and culinary creator. Recently, she was named Oklahoma’s Dietitian of the Year and awarded the Rising Star award from her alma mater, the OSU College of Human Sciences.
Sheri has been involved with food from a young age having grown up on a farm in agriculture, but her interest in nutrition was really spurred by her passion for basketball which she was fortunate enough to play through college. Her focu was born out of necessity, learning how to make the most mindful choices in her nutrition to benefit and support her athletic performance. Now as a parent, her interest in nutrition and how she talks about food has been elevated even more.
As a registered dietitian, her mission is to help people realize that we are better together with food. It doesn’t have to be a negative thing that takes up unnecessary mental space and weight in our minds. We eat multiple times a day. Sheri feels that it is so heavy to know that some people are having an internal battle every time they put a bite into their mouths.
She strongly believes that the number on the scale doesn’t indicate anything about yourself, how impactful you are, or how you make a difference in people’s lives. Hiding the scale and putting it away is sometimes a healthy step so that you can remove your measure of worth from your mass.
Around every corner is a new diet and it can be easy to get caught up in the noise. People continue to look for the magic pill, but at the end of the day sensible nutrition isn’t sexy. If a diet sounds sexy, it’s likely not a long term solution for the rest of our lives.
We live in a world where there is instant gratification in everything we do. We want our amazon packages promptly, we want the internet to load immediately, and we want our diets to work overnight. Patience is a hard practice, but lasting transformation and healing relationships with food don’t happen overnight.
GENERATIONAL IMPACT
How we’re raised and the generational conversations around food has further complicated our relationship with it.
The majority of the time, our broken relationship with food is not our fault. It’s not even our parents fault. As infants, our hunger/fullness cue works. The second solid foods come into play, now the adult in charge feels like they have the responsibility to make us eat certain things. It often happens early on. Maybe it’s telling the kids to, “Eat one more bite,” or, “You can’t leave the table until you’ve cleaned your plate.”
Sheri is here to tell us that the Clean Plate Club is officially disbanded.
That being said, it helps us to understand where that mindset came from. The generations before us grew up during a time of food insecurity and scarcity. However, now, most of us are privileged enough to have an abundance of food.
It’s an opportunity for parents to change the conversations around mealtime, no longer putting foods on a pedestal and forcing children to eat broccoli to earn a brownie. She encourages us to remove morality from it and the idea of “good” versus “bad” foods.
The way we change the legacy is by healing our own relationship with food first. Continue asking yourself “why” with compassionate curiosity when it comes to your thoughts and beliefs around food. Awareness is always the best place to start. Once you’re aware, you can begin to peel back the layers and foster a healthier relationship with food for yourself, and as a result, the generations to follow.
THE PROBLEM WITH RESTRICTION
When people approach changing their diet, restriction and cutting things out tends to be the first step they want to take. Unfortunately, that may be the same thing that’s keeping them stuck.
Instead of restricting Oreos entirely, what if we said yes when we wanted them, enjoyed it, and moved on?
The internal dialogue can feel like a silent battle we’re fighting in our heads. Once you “can’t” do or have something, that often becomes all you can focus on. Food should not be weighing you down as much as it does for a lot of us. Saying “no” all the time is not a long term solution.
Restricting food is like putting your both through a famine and teaching your body scarcity. Your body doesn’t know you’re restricting in the name of health, all it knows is that food isn’t available when it’s hungry. That’s a big reason why the binge-restrict cycle and yo-yo dieting is so prevalent. When we do allow ourselves to enjoy those restricted foods, our body overindulges because it’s not sure when the next famine is going to be around the corner.
The lack of consistency from this restrictive behavior makes your body feel unsure when it’s going to be nourished again and our desire for quick results gets in the way of long term solutions.
NAVIGATING FOOD DURING THE HOLIDAYS
Sheri’s best tip for the holidays is to set yourself up for success.
SUCCESS TIP 1: If you know certain foods are going to be at the holiday dinner that don’t make your body feel its best, what can you bring to fill in the gaps? If you know there won’t be many veggies for you to enjoy, bring your own to share! It can give you a little more sense of power and ownership in your choices.
SUCCESS TIP 2: Keep in mind that no matter what you eat or indulge in this holiday season, it’s one day and one meal. It’s not going to completely derail you. Enjoy it, go to bed, and pick back up tomorrow. After all, it’s more about the people that you’re enjoying the meal with than the food.
The inner dialogue of guilt and shame around food can distract us from the purpose of why we gather and share meals during the holidays in the first place.
Many of us think the food and overindulgence is the problem, but the biggest problem is typically how we mentally beat the crap out of ourselves afterwards which lasts far more than one day. It’s our thoughts and self-judgement that makes us spiral, not the holiday desserts.
SUCCESS TIP 3: Don’t “save up” for the holidays by not eating until the holiday meal. When you approach the holiday meal with extreme hunger, you’re more likely to overindulge on foods that won’t make your body feel great. Nourish yourself well throughout the day to set yourself up for success at mealtime.
DEALING WITH FOOD COMMENTS
Weight comments around the dinner table, whether you’ve lost or gained, can be a common occurrence in many families, especially after not seeing one another for such a long time.
Give yourself permission to remove yourself from the conversation if needed. It’s okay to ask people not to make comments about your body and food choices. Perhaps it’s an opportunity to have an open conversation with your family, if you’re comfortable. In order to change the legacy, we have to start challenging the thought and changing the conversations.
Keep in mind, people’s comments might be uncalled for but well-intentioned. Be compassionately curious about what internal struggles they may be working through with their own body and food choices that might be projected onto you.
COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT NUTRITION
There’s a lot of noise around nutrition. As someone who is a rancher and raises food for human consumption as well as a nutrition professional, Sheri is passionate about helping people understand where their food comes from and how it nourishes their body.
The number one thing she wants people to know is that if they enjoy animal protein, it is 100% a-okay to consume them. They are extremely nutrient rich and have the micronutrients we need that can be difficult to find elsewhere in your diet without a nutrition professional’s help.
The biggest question is what we are pairing our foods with. She finds that most people aren’t consuming enough fiber. If you enjoy a steak, how can you pair it with a fiber for a more nutrient dense and well-balanced meal?
Along with her husband Kyle and children, Sheri lives in a small farming community in Oklahoma. They raise drought tolerant crops including hard red winter wheat and hard white winter wheat. They also raise cattle that compliments their operation as well. Beyond cattle and wheat, they’ve raised canola, sesame, and most recently milo.
The more we understand what it takes for food to go from pasture to plate, I think it can help us find even more gratitude for the food on our holiday dinner table. Rooting yourself in gratitude for food, the people who raised it, the people who prepared it, and the people you’re enjoying it with can be such a healing experience.
Remember this Thanksgiving, and all year round, to find gratitude for the food in front of you, ignore the noise inside your head and around you, and enjoy your meals with the people you love most.
CONNECT WITH SHERI
Sheri has been kind enough to share discount code with listeners to use in the DirtRoadDietitian.com/Store. Use code CLIMB for $5 off your purchase. In the store, you’ll find lots of informational pieces and handouts you can download. CODE EXPIRES: 12/31/21
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