The official 2021 holiday gift guide is here!
We're gearing up for the new year (and a big announcement) so everything in the shop is 40% off. On top of that we’ve create a vibey holiday gift guide for everyone on your list. Happy holidays!
How Diet Culture Alters Our Views on Ethnic Cuisine
Many of us are interested in improving our health and when that topic comes up it commonly involves food. It has been my experience that this typically includes a conversation about avoiding takeout from Chinese restaurants or complaints about how curry cannot be a diet food. I have always felt lonely in these conversations because I want to live a healthy lifestyle, but I do not want to resent the food of my food that diet culture often deems unhealthy. Eating a non-western diet is nourishment. In the workbook, “Nourishment Beyond Food” by TRILUNA, “diet culture makes us believe that certain foods are bad and others good without any understanding of bio-individuality.” Diet culture has created a toxic message for many people with ethnic backgrounds with the love of their cuisines being unhealthy.
Triluna 2021 Summer Intern - Nafisa Hossain
This topic is personal to me because it is suggested that ethic foods do not provide enough nutrients to function throughout the day. There was one time in middle school were I decided to bring my favorite curry my mom made the night before with some rice and some of my friends at the time hurled insults such as “wow that's not good for you” or “I can’t believe you eat this everyday”. Because of these words, I brought sandwiches with a bag of grapes or carrots. Growing up in the west, many ethnic cuisines are deemed unhealthy and lacking nutrition. Due to this demonization, many healthy food plans by dietitians and nutritionists, particularly the ones with western backgrounds, make no room for people who want to be healthy and be able to eat their culture’s foods. Often, on the cheat days of diets or healthy meal plans (days where the dieter can eat anything they want rather than restrict), many opt to eat ethnic foods such as curries, soul food, tacos, or sushi. Despite what this behavior suggests ethnic foods are actually incredibly nourishing, delicious food with many health benefits--perhaps even more so than the traditional western diet
Non-white dietitians say that if you opt for bland food instead of your culture’s food the chances are high that the diet will not be sustainable. These dietitians, such as Dr. Kera Nyemb-Diop (@black.nutrionist), help their clients make healthier choices by creating food plans that are tailored to their culture. On an Instagram post on June 2nd, Dr. Nyemb-Diop mentioned how her clients have a hard time finding a perfect meal plan and so often opt for bland chicken and broccoli. She then talks about how that approach is not sustainable because it can lead to binge eating because they are unsatisfied.
In the book “Anti-Diet,” author Christy Harrison touches on how diet culture hinders people with cultural backgrounds and how many become detached from their heritage. Harrison states that this approach is sad and unnecessary. I too have noticed the disconnect. At cultural festivals I have seen participants get salads rather than the other foods offered because we have been conditioned that a big plate of vegetables is better than having rice and meat as a meal. Harrison also touched upon how diet culture influences people in the way they approach eating the abundance of food placed in front of them at family gatherings and feeling bad for not eating as much as they want since diet culture created this way of thinking. Because of this, many do not create human connections and lose a sense of self when they are dieting intensely.
The best way to maneuver through the toxic standards of diet culture, in my opinion, is to find recipes made by BIPOC chefs or food content creators. There are many BIPOC dietitians, such as Dr. Kera Nyemb-Diop and Dalina Soto MA RD LDN (@your.latina.nutritionist), that help guide many who grew up eating their ethnic dishes and have a hard time eating healthy. Another BIPOC content creator is @eatsbyramya on TikTok that helps out people who like healthy-ish and easy South Asian foods. Another South Asian food content creator that helps curate different cuisines recipes is @fatimasfabulouskitchen on instagram. For anyone who is vegetarian or vegan, @okonomikitchen on instagram makes healthy vegan Japanese recipes that can be simple to make.
It's important to consider mental health when it comes to diet culture. Some people who want to diet but refuse to reject their cuisines will be lost on their journey. Some will have anxious thoughts and deem that their foods are unhealthy and they should eat salads instead of a plate full of their cuisines. By embracing the food from our heritage, we can decolonize our way of thinking about what is and is not diet food and look at our food as nourishment.
Written by Nafisa Hossain
The Future of Corporate Wellness
Our CEO was asked by the Nashville Business Journal what the biggest storyline in our industry (corporate wellness) is right now. To read it in the NBJ and learn from other industry experts click here or read below for the full version and our thoughts on the future of corporate wellness.
“2021 is the year that we finally start to see wellness as more than fitness, perhaps even divorced from it. Pre-pandemic we were slowly creeping out from under the influence of fitness and towards mindfulness, but after a year riddle by uncertainly, change, social unrest, and trauma the conversations must necessarily go deeper. Step challenges and group yoga can be fine components of corporate wellness programs but they are not enough. The things we see coming up over and over again now are a renewed focus on mental health including attention to community care, understanding the impact racism and bigotry has on health, avoiding burnout, and staying connected when remote.
Corporate wellness is now both simultaneously a necessity and luxury. Most employee benefit (read: retention) programs know they must include some form of wellness while also acknowledging that these programs are seriously lacking. True wellness starts from the top down. Literally. Leadership must be bought into the idea in order for it to work. It has to be bigger than fitness. It must include more than movement to impact the deeper culture of the organization. Are we still glorifying hustle culture? How often are we taking a hard look beyond diversity to inclusion? Are we encouraging conversations where our employees can be vulnerable and authentic so that we can get to the heart of the issue? How are we honoring down and off-time? Wellness programs must start looking beyond physical appearance to mental health in order to have a real impact on the bottom line.”
A Cleansing Ritual For Manifesting Your Dreams
This is an excerpt from our “Everyday Magick” Workbook. You can shop the full collection including a physical copy or digital download of the workbook here. A lot of love and energy went into making this collection so please support where you can! You can also follow us on IG @TRILUNA_wellness and stay in touch for future supper clubs, retreats, and updates to the collection!
One of our mentors, in the long-ago world of pre-pandemic, said during an herbalism workshop, “the knowledge keepers are being called.” And it moved us. It got inside of us and moved things around, shifted our understanding of the world around us, and our place in that world. What she meant was that much of the old knowledge (specifically of herbalism in this case, but also of magic, community, and kindness) has been lost. And now the knowledge keepers, the light seekers, and magic makers are being called to attention. We’re being asked to pick up the mantel and carry this knowledge into the future. “But what does this have to do with manifestation?” You might ask. The answer: everything.
What it means is that we have the ability to create new rituals, new magic, and also to rediscover what’s been lost, and uncover what has been buried. There is a lot of negative energy moving around in the world right now. And it’s heavy. It sticks to your bones and pulls you down. We believe that negative energy isn’t necessarily bad. The philosophies of our company are anti-diet culture and anti-racist. This ritual isn’t designed to pacify the energies that motivate you to create change or to ignore the shadow side of your work. It’s designed to help you create space. It is designed to help you clear away what isn’t serving you so you can focus on what’s ahead and work towards creating (i.e. manifesting) a life you love.
There are many ways to perform rituals. The form you chose to take is entirely up to you. This is one of our favorites. Put your own spin on it. Make room for growth.
WHAT YOU’LL NEED: (Don’t have it? Shop the rituals collection here.)
Crystal
Candle
Pen
Paper
Incense
HOW TO DO IT:
1. Before you begin, write down on a piece of paper what dreams or goals you have for your space. What do you want to bring or invite into it?
2. Light your candle, and from that your incense, and trace the lines of your room moving up and down the lines of the walls and up and over each of the doorways. Trace every corner of the room as if you are creating an invisible seal.
3. Put your incense down in something like an ashtray, on the side of your candle, in an incense burner (*note: please do not burn your house doing this, we don’t need THAT MUCH clearing).
4. Close your eyes or stare into the flame of the candle and try to slow the mind. Take three deep breaths, breathing into the belly, taking in as much air as you can, and releasing it. Imagine bringing in all that you desire for your space, filling it until it pushes out what you no longer desire. Imagine it as a cloud of smoke rising out from inside your body and up into the air, filling the room with a calming, delicious smell and soothing energy.
5. Then take your piece of paper and reread it. Read it three or four times. Take a few deep breaths and spend a few minutes visualizing what your life will look like once what’s on that paper comes to life. When you’re done put it somewhere where you will see it often and repeat this ritual as often as you’d like.
CONGRATS you did it! And now you know how you can be a knowledge keeper, light seeker, magic maker yourself. We don’t claim that rituals like this will solve your problems. But it will give you some perspective and some space. It will help you see the negative impact that energy has had in and on your body and it will give you permission to process it.
A note: It’s so very important when you’re doing a ritual or using sacred plants to pay homage to the culture it came from. Please don’t use wildcrafted white sage. Be aware of how your palo santo is harvested. If you already have it, use it, but show gratitude for the tree or plant it came from and the Indigenous peoples that created that ritual for you.
Wellness Isn't What We Think It Is
CW: disordered eating and weight loss
My love of cooking started young. The first thing I ever remember creating was a jammy, fruit enchilada dish with rice...not my best work but my parents were gracious enough to pretend to like it. My connection to creativity has always been cooking. But in middle school, I saw the beginnings of an eating disorder that would consume me for the next decade. My relationship with food soured, and there’s little need to cook when you’re not eating, so I stopped cooking for a long time.
Eventually, I realized not eating was going to get me caught and I would have to stop engaging in those behaviors, which I was not ready to do, and so I found “wellness.” Or the cult of wellness as I now call it. I was able to hide my disorders by cloaking them in socially acceptable behaviors like diets, cleanses, and an obsessive emphasis on fitness and running. Unsurprisingly, moving from not eating to wellness didn’t solve any of my problems. I still had body dysmorphia. My anxiety was consuming me from the inside out. Stress was taking a heavy toll on my life.
But during this time I got so many compliments. “You look amazing.” “Have you lost weight??” “Tell me your secrets!” “You must practice such restraint! I could never do that.”
I was getting compliments on my eating disorder. Because that’s what we think wellness is, don’t we? Thinness? Being physically fit?
It’s not. You can be thin and unwell. You can be fat and well. You can claim to “eat clean” (not a thing) and be mentally unwell. You can be fit and struggling with body dysmorphia.
When wellness focuses on physical appearance it fails us. It makes assumptions and judgments that are often false. It’s reductionist. It loses the context of community, it disregards the impact of racism and bigotry on our physical health, it forgets that wellness isn’t a rich (thin, cis, white) woman’s game.
I found my way back to my body through cooking. And therapy. I slowly realized that the walls of wellness I had built around me were actually prejudiced, insidious things built to make me feel safer because society told me that if I was thin I was good. I was better. I was best.
Eventualy I started eating bread again. And then I started baking it. And then I made pastries. And hand pies. And slowly. Over many years I peeled away the layers of diet culture. I continue to do so now.
When we created our Nourishment Beyond Food workshop it was to help others also get back to a connection with their food—to see food as nourishment but also a way to build community, to connect with the earth, to celebrate culture. It was also to get one to consider other areas of nourishment in their lives. As we often say “all the kale in the world won’t help if you’re not dealing with your stress, or if you lack joy, or if you’re ignoring your mental health.”
I challenge you this week to rethink what you think you know about wellness. Investigate your assumptions. Dig into the history of BMI. Do research on how the medical industry continues to fail BIPOC men and women every day. Research how fatphobia affects the mental and physical wellness of those living in stigmatized bodies. I challenge you to get back in the kitchen as a celebration of community and togetherness.
-Elizabeth Moore