Foodsane Offers a Compassionate Alternative to Diet Culture

For many people, food can become tangled up with guilt, anxiety and an exhausting sense that they are somehow failing.

Restrictive diets, conflicting wellness advice and pressure to lose weight can make it increasingly difficult to recognise and respond to the body’s natural needs.

A new psychology-based wellness community aims to offer a gentler and more compassionate way forward.

Foodsane has been launched by Devon-based Dr Joanna North, a Chartered Researching Psychologist, Fellow of the British Psychological Society and Senior Accredited Psychotherapist with more than 40 years of clinical experience.

Rather than treating eating habits as a simple matter of willpower, Foodsane focuses on psychological safety, nervous-system regulation, body awareness and self-compassion.

Dr North has developed the RAFT framework, which stands for Right Amount, Right Food and Right Time. It is accompanied by a concept she calls Time Related Eating, or TRE, which encourages people to become more aware of how the timing of food may relate to their physical and emotional wellbeing.

Central to the approach is interoception, the ability to notice and understand signals from within the body. These can include hunger, fullness, tension, tiredness and changes in mood.

Foodsane is intended to offer a “middle way” for people who feel caught between restrictive diet culture, medicalised approaches to weight loss and potentially harmful or disordered eating patterns. Its message is not that people should simply try harder, but that eating is influenced by stress, emotions, habits and whether a person feels safe and settled.

“So much of the wellness industry treats eating as a willpower problem,” Dr North told That's Health.

“It isn’t. It’s a nervous system problem, a psychological safety problem. Foodsane exists to bring the evidence base and forty years of clinical experience to people who are tired of being told to try harder.”

The Foodsane initiative includes a paid online community in which members can follow Dr North’s daily Time Related Eating diary. They also receive a weekly newsletter summarising three key learning points.

Accessible guidance is shared through the FoodsaneJoanna accounts on Instagram and TikTok, while Dr North’s 2024 book, Foodsane, explores the complete framework.

No single approach will be right for everybody, and anyone experiencing an eating disorder or significant concerns about eating, weight or health should seek appropriately qualified professional help. Prescribed weight-loss medication should never be stopped or changed without consulting the clinician responsible for it.

Nevertheless, the compassionate thinking behind Foodsane may resonate with people who have spent years blaming themselves. Eating is not a moral test, and needing support is not a personal failure.

More information can be found at www.foodsane.co.uk.

23rd - 29th January 2012 is Food Allergy and Intolerance Week

Is it possible some of you suffer from food intolerance? Food Allergy and Intolerance Week might be a good time to find out!

Food allergies and intolerances are becoming increasingly common. Even though some experts doubt this.

But what is a food intolerance and how does it differ from a food allergy?

A classic food allergy only affects around 2% of the population but symptoms can be severe and sudden. In contrast, food intolerances are much more common and may occur when certain antibodies (known as IgG) are triggered, as the result of a reaction to specific foods.

Almost any food can cause a reaction but foods eaten most regularly are often the chief culprits – typically, wheat and dairy products, closely followed by other gluten grains, eggs and yeast. Symptoms may be delayed for hours or even days after eating the food, making it very difficult to pinpoint the culprit. Having several intolerances further confounds the situation! But, don’t worry, help is at hand!

The Food Intolerance Tests Kit is available from Higher Nature

This simple home test kit can test for 40, 60 or 120 foods. Higher Naturee send you a complete kit, full instructions, transport box and a pre-paid envelope (For use within the UK) to send it to the lab. The results will be sent directly to the customer in approximately 10 days.

Possible symptoms of a food intolerance include:
· Anxiety (acute or chronic)
· Attention Deficit Disorder
· Constipation
· Diarrhoea
· Headaches
· Insomnia
· Migraine
· Water retention
· Arthritis
· Fibromyalgia
· Asthma
· Bloating
· Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
· Depression
· Gastritis, Inflammatory Bowel Disease
· Itchy skin
· Weight control problems
· Hyperactivity disorder
· Irritable Bowel Syndrome

Higher Nature has a team of qualified Nutritionists who can give advice on managing food intolerance.

 Higher Nature intolerance testing is provided by Cambridge Nutritional Sciences, a Corporate Partner of Allergy UK, organisers of Food Allergy and Intolerance Week.

Weighty matters

As a child and as a young teenager I was, as my mother put it, “almost as thin as a whippet.” Unfortunately at about 16 or so I stopped growing in height and continued growing in width and girth. This problem was mitigated by the fact that I lead a fairly active lifestyle and had, for some years, also had a physically demanding occupation.

Eventually I married and settled in to married life and took up a mostly sedentary job until one day my wife said: “I can't get my arms around you! What on earth do you weigh, now?”

We decided to find out and it was with horror that I discovered that I was weighing a little over 19 stone. We realised that something must be done.

But what?

I decided that the first step I should take to address this issue was to analyse my lifestyle. There were too may snacks. A cake shop that sold yesterday's still delicious cakes and rolls at a large bag for only a Pound was one culprit, another one was a discount shop that sold everything from packs of crisps to tins of beans at remarkably low prices was another. Actually, that's not true. The only culprit was my inability to somehow understand that no matter how cheap something is, it still contains just as many calories as when it was at full price!

A bag of chips at only a Pound a bag might have seemed like a delicious and cheap lunch but they, too, piled on the pounds, whilst saving on the Pounds. My wife is also an exceptionally good cook.

Crisps, chips and sweets were, I decided, not good and so were dropped from my diet.

My wife decided that an increase in the amount of fresh fruit and vegetables we consumed would be a good idea. For some reason I had never been a big eater of fresh fruit, but this was changed as part of our healthy eating campaign. We vastly boosted the amount of fresh vegetables (which I love) so this was not much of a problem. And if one shops carefully, the amount of fresh fruit and vegetables one can purchase is considerable.

I also took the decision to walk to and from our home to my office, which is two miles away. So from only walking at weekends when we went out together I found myself walking four miles a day, or 20 miles a week. My wife has a part time job in the evenings, so I decided to walk to meet her from work every evening, another two miles a day, bringing my daily total to six miles a day, or 30 miles a week.

Within several weeks my wife noticed a difference and over a period of several years my weight fell from a little over 19 stone to 14.5 stone.

There have, of course, been relapses. The odd bag of crisps here, the odd chocolate bar there. The bakery and cake shop owner retired, his premises became a traditional sweet shop, something ele to be avoided, and the discount shop is still filled with bargains, but, on the whole, I have stuck to my resolve and am now looking forward to shedding a further several stone in weight.