Episode 14
Hello and welcome to the Beyond Nourished Podcast. This is the place where, usually, you come to learn about short tips and tricks to becoming a better, more efficient health-focused cook. But today, due to some listener requests, I'm actually going to be talking about myself and my own health and healing journey.
I find it relatively ironic that this is what I'm talking about on this episode because I am just on the tail end of healing from the coronavirus. It has just swept the area that I live in, and I have been with it for about 10 days now and so happy to be on the tail end!
My name is Rachelle Girardin, I am your host. I am a holistic nutritionist, private chef, and the creator of the holistic chef and business training certification, and this is the story of my health journey!
From a very early age, I was always interested in sports. Sports were something that I realized that I was quite good at, and that just led me in the direction of wanting to be involved with them more and more, and so very naturally, I was always interested in body image and staying fit. I remember going to the gym quite early and I took an interest in nutrition at an early age. However, in my early 20s, I went travelling right out of high school and was dealing with a lot of homesickness and a broken heart and I turned to food for comfort. During that time, I gained about 35 pounds in a three-month time frame - I just ballooned right up! It was so beyond the freshman 10, I think it's called.
At the time I had no tools in my toolbox for dealing with a boyfriend that I’d had back home who was moving on with his life while I was - even though I was traveling across the world - dealing with a very broken heart.
I came home eventually, and I was able to take the weight off by going to the gym and having a regular routine. I was eating relatively normal, and I was just feeling comfortable again and therefore settled back into the body that I knew.
But shortly after that, still dealing with the same heartbreak, I started partying and my obsession and turning to food really just turned to alcohol and drugs. This seems to be a very common thing that happens in people’s early 20s, but I was taking it way too far. I had flipped my weight gain on its head and I had lost about 40 pounds in a relatively short amount of time and hadn't even realized it.
This was back in 2006, I believe, and I was living with a childhood friend at the time. I think she was relatively concerned. She took me to a yoga class. The class was at a YMCA gym that was brightly lit with fluorescent lighting, they didn't even have enough yoga mats, the gym was packed with people so we were using those slippery stretch mats - but I fell in love with what yoga was. And from there, I found a new attachment to something that was all of a sudden about being healthy and returning me back to myself in a lot of ways.
For many of you that have tried yoga or heard about yoga, you know that it's not just about a physical practice. There is a spiritual element, there is a mental element, and it really encompasses wellbeing from the inside out. From that first class, I really found it.
After that, I was trying every type of yoga class I could find. And this is when yoga was not very popular. I grew up in small-town Saskatchewan. I was living in Saskatoon at the time, but I luckily found an incredible teacher, and his name was Ryan Leer from One Yoga. He was also just starting his journey back then, but I went to one of his classes and there was cool music, and there was such a vibe and I was like, I have to do this! And so I decided to become a yoga teacher.
I was really searching for my meaning in life at this point. I had dropped out of university, it didn't feel like a fit for me. I was working as a waitress at that time, and I decided that I was just going to take this plunge and hopefully put this partying past behind me.
I was very encouraged by my parents who had kind of intervened at this time to maybe take this step, and I packed up my bags and I went down to Baja, Mexico to live for about a month and a half to take this yoga teacher training.
In this timeframe, I, unfortunately, went back to my old habits - when I didn't now have alcohol and drugs, I turned back to food. Here I was gaining another 30 pounds, and I remember the obsession hitting in a way that it never had in the past.
Oh my goodness, I remember feeling so full and bloated and confused this whole trip. Here I was, on one hand, doing this super healthy thing, and then, on the other hand, I was just doing this other incredibly unhealthy thing. The truth is, I was still young, I still just didn't have the tools to deal with the discomfort and the reality of my life, which was that I was relatively unhappy.
When I came back from that yoga teacher training, I decided to move. I definitely moved in a search for happiness and travelled in search for happiness - but I moved to Canmore, Alberta, and I was still dealing with just erratic eating and compulsive eating and obsessive eating, and it was starting to just take over and rule my life.
In that, I was doing a lot of self-discovery through yoga. There's kind of this ironic parallel trying to learn about yourself more and yet just ignoring everything that you’re learning.
I luckily found a wonderful group of people there that introduced me to this morning ritual on Sundays, held by a couple of women called A Goddess Brunch. I went one morning and I met this wonderful woman named Sam, and she made these blueberry spelt muffins and I asked her what she did and she told me she was a holistic nutritionist, and I was enthralled.
She told me a little bit about the program that she went to, called IHN. I looked into it when I got home later that day, called the director of the school, Shana, and I was like, this is something I could do! It was a one-year full-time program, at the time it was in Toronto, Canada, and I thought, you know what, I can do this! I can do it for a year and I will just make this happen! This sounds so perfect for everything that I want to do and I'll finally have a career.
In that time frame, IHN actually opened up a Vancouver campus, which I feel so grateful for because that is where I have come to live and build my home. At the time when I first looked into it, it wasn't available here, but I was the first student who signed up for their program back in 2010.
When I went to that school, I really told people and I tried to convince myself, that I was really there for simply a career. But the truth is, is that I was there to know better so that I could potentially change my own personal habits. I was there for self-healing, but I did not want to admit that at all. Going through IHN and the beginning of my nutrition journey was probably the most unhealthy I had ever been in my life.
Every piece of information was driving me in a different direction. For those of you who have looked into nutrition information, you can find conflicting info everywhere you look.
At the time, I was heavily influenced by the raw vegan world. I was working at a raw vegan restaurant, and that was truly how I was told was the best way to eat. So I was just still stuck in this place of very confusing food habits. I was trying to control it so much with my knowledge and the education that I was learning, but the truth is, is that I was still in so much pain inside. I was uncomfortable in my own skin and just dealing with not being happy. It's truly that simple.
When I pull out the lens of the whole thing, there was an unhappiness in the trend of my life through my late teens until my 30s almost. It was a very uncomfortable place for me to be. But in hindsight, you look at it all through another lens that it’s also very beautiful.
But here I was in nutrition school, and I started my business Beyond Nourished in the second semester of school, which is still running to this day. I didn't really necessarily know what it was going to look like, but I started just saying yes to every experience that came my way, every opportunity that came my way. I did so many things at the beginning, from consulting to teaching workshops, to doing private cooking when I had never even tried that before. Luckily, this person hired me from Victoria BC, his name is Taylor Conroy. He had had a personal chef cook for him before, and he basically laid the framework for me of how it was going to look, and I really followed that and I continued doing that for as many people as I could find.
It was definitely a bumpy ride, not only from a business perspective but also for me from my health and food perspective because being around food was so triggering. I would overeat everything in sight if I was having a bad day. You can imagine being in the kitchen for eight to ten hours a day, this was cause for a lot of concern because I would get done my day's work, but I would realize that I had been eating all day.
There would be times where I was so uncomfortable in my work or I was just trying to get away from the stress of the day, where I would eat double what somebody would eat in a normal serving. I would want to just get rid of it in any way, and I use all different types of modalities to just get that food out of my system. It was just awful because I was building this beautiful business, I was finally on the career path that I wanted, I felt on purpose, and then at the same time, there was this thing that was just dragging me down and down and down.
Finally, through a series of the work that I was still doing through yoga, I found therapy. I had done therapy in the past, but never to the extent of admitting what was actually going on in my life. I think a lot of people do use therapy or they get told that they should use therapy, but they don't necessarily share what's actually going on. I have to admit that that was my experience in using it at the beginning of my 20s when somebody had first introduced me to it. But here I was at the end of my 20s, and I decided to just let it all out. It happened to be with a woman who was actually in my nutrition program, and I felt so uncomfortable talking to her, but I knew that she had dealt with eating disorders in the past. I was so fed up with myself that I said, this is the time, this is where I'm gonna do it. It was a series of talk therapy, finding community in Vancouver, and realizing and admitting that eating a raw vegan diet was not for me. I started to introduce meat back into my diet, even though it went against everything and what almost everyone around me was telling me. But I was finally learning how to have the confidence and the discipline to just listen to myself and stick to that regardless of what was going on.
So fast forward, and it's been five to six years, maybe even longer, since I feel like I've dealt with controlling food issues. It really just began to taper off. If you are someone who is dealing with compulsive eating, binging or anything like that, please just stay committed to the path of healing and know that one day you are going to wake up and you're going to realize that it's been ten days since you've dealt with the same controlling issues, and then all of a sudden it will be a year and then it will be two years. And truly, there are little relapses that might happen at some point, but the space between becomes more and more and more, and you just have to stay on the path of tuning back into yourself and trusting yourself.
To this day, I now am at my goal weight. I've been here for the last - on and off - five years. It feels incredible to eat what I want and eat a wide range of food. Sometimes even not healthy ones, and be totally okay with that as well. It's just so wonderful not to have food rule my decisions or control when I'm going through uncomfortable periods in my life.
But in that, I had to forget so much of what I knew to get back to a place of finding me. I hope that hearing this story, whoever you are, wherever you are, sheds some light on my path of becoming a holistic nutritionist and also just about finding my own happiness in the life that I live.
I can tell you this looking back on everything, is that the relationship that you have with food, if it is something that you want to work on, really don't look at the relationship that you have with food. Look at everything else around you, look inside of yourself, look at the life that you're living in, and consider making changes on those levels - and you might just see your relationship with food improve.
I hope that you've enjoyed today's episode and stay tuned for the next episode, where we'll get back to our regular programming of teaching you some wonderful tips and tricks on how to become a better, more efficient health-focused cook.