The season of resolutions is in full swing. And among them, the eternal quest for thinness. What if we approached food with kindness rather than restrictions? At least that’s the idea that recipe designer Caroline Huard, known as Loounie, shared in an Instagram post that drew much applause. The duty spoke with her to explore the subject. Interview by Sophie Grenier-Héroux.
January often rhymes with a new goal of wellness. We want to move more, eat better, get enough sleep. And for many, it is also a quest to lose weight. In your post, you made a list of food resolution ideas that had nothing to do with diet. Where did the idea come from?
After the holidays, what we need is to get back into a routine. We highly value the fact of not liking the routine when our nervous system likes it. He likes it when we go to bed at regular times, when we eat and move around regularly. It doesn’t mean to be rigid, but it is a tendency to be embraced.
What we are also looking for is to regain some control. Right now, we don’t have much control. So we will try to control what we eat or our weight. Since I put the diet mentality aside, I have transferred the search for routine and control to my kitchen. I am naturally disorganized and regularly have to declutter. That’s why I decided to share some tips. It’s so much nicer to spend more time cooking and preparing meals.
FSort out the sorting in the spatula drawer, sharpen your knives, tidy up the spices, learn to cook legumes… Your tips were all very concrete. What’s your top tip for making workable resolutions?
One of the resolutions we could take is to re-evaluate our kitchen environment every week or every month. Is my cooking still optimal? The stuff that works doesn’t always look good like it does on Pinterest. For example, on my counter, I have a pot that I put my favorite knife, spatula, tongs, and wooden spoon in. If we know that we tend to be a little tired or to forget, we have to make things visible. Same thing in the fridge. And we must not take for granted that if we have done a reorganization once, it’s over. Keep a to-do list in the fridge to make the kitchen inviting, like getting a new can opener or a new non-stick skillet.
There are a multitude of marketing strategies that attempt to spark the weight loss reflex. How to adopt a healthy diet without falling into the trap of diets and constraints?
Having an inviting and functional kitchen that makes us want to spend time there, it will undoubtedly make us want to cook more. And we know it’s good to cook our meals ourselves. If our goal this week is to cook three dinners rather than having Uber Eats delivered and we succeed in doing so, it gives us a feeling of control, of accomplishment that, on the contrary, we would seek with the control of a diet. Cooking more meets certain needs that will make us less vulnerable to the diet culture. After … It doesn’t completely protect us. We live a pressure of thinness. We are in a grossophobic world.
You often speak openly about body image and the stigma in society. Do you believe that the anti-diet movement succeeds in making us see the pressure of thinness differently?
The movement is here and many people are realizing that diets don’t work. But that doesn’t mean the diet mentality is gone. We say to ourselves: I’m paying attention. You can really be on a diet without knowing it. We are starting to recognize that grossophobia is discrimination against fat people. But we have a hard time recognizing that if we are a person of average height and that we do not like our bead, that is grossophobic. We were programmed like that. There is a lot of work to be done.
Before being a recipe creator, you were a mental health occupational therapist. We are in a very sensitive era for mental health, and food is often seen as an object of comfort. How do you avoid seeing food as a guilty pleasure?
Diet culture demonizes eating your emotions a lot, but it’s okay for food to be linked to emotions. Eating a birthday cake because you’re celebrating someone is to eat their emotions! Using the food is not a problem. The problem is whether it is the only or our main tool. Cooking is very therapeutic, eating can be part of it, but you have to have other ways to regulate yourself emotionally. Previously, my role was to help people get back to business. Depression was starting to be a plague at the time. I know well what concerns motivation. Instead of judging, we must try to understand our obstacles.
You launched your podcast this week Face down: diet culture with Loounie, where you try to better understand the culture of diet and, above all, to understand how to develop a healthy relationship with food and our body. What do you remember from your interviews?
I remember that having dissatisfaction with our body is almost universal and it is a daily concern. And then, no matter how hard we work on ourselves, become an intuitive eater, accept our body as it is; there are still systemic issues, clothing that is not accessible, less representation on TV and messages sent by health professionals telling us that if you are a fat person, you are of less value. As long as we do not collectively take actions to deconstruct ideas related to thinness, it will always have to be done again for the generations to follow.