a well buttered, saucy exit from 'Clean'

what if you might never Good Girl your way to deep feminine vitality?

I love the architecture of real food. There's a beauty to it that ultra processed garbage just cannot capture. The aroma & buttery foam when you baste a steak in fresh rosemary. The way raw honey glistens as you drizzle it on your eggs. The sweet, textured crunch of a pineapple. Tearing basil leaves in your hands. Grating nutty parmigiano reggiano over breakfast. The sound of cracking a whole egg. It's Art. - Rocky, The War Kitchen.

Everytime I tell someone my story of discovering how eating for pleasure again is the healthiest ‘diet,’ I get a classic, standard template reaction that is based entirely in fear, punishment-mentality and lack. “Oh, if I stop being strict and eat for pleasure, I’ll just eat 40 McDonald’s burgers a day and make myself sick.”

That’s like saying that only what happens in porn is lovemaking.

The healthiest thing I ever experienced, as well as saw transform so many women in my life, was moving away from the extreme self discipline and Catholic guilt-esque self-denial that comes with being the perfect ‘Clean Girl, Good Girl’ who’s doing all the healthy things. Little by little, I’ve started discovering quiet, soft, beautiful voices, from women who move through the world like they are juicy, well-fed, well-f***ed, and something about the way pleasure rewires our very capacity to be alive and singing with health was undeniable. For me, personally, coming back to being non-vegetarianism again was the best thing I did for my health, even though that’s obviously not for everyone.

I have stumbled into so many worlds the past few years, that were like shimmering portals leading me into an understanding of how eating in a balanced, discerning, intuitive and loving manner that honours pleasure as necessary medicine is the most wholesome, nourishing and life-giving way of living.

There’s too many of us doing All The Healthy Things, and still feeling like shit. Sometimes, looking like it too. We’re still hormonally imbalanced, fried, mentally burnt out, rigid, dried up, anxious, dysregulated and so not a delight to be around.

When we attempt to understand true pleasure, cultivating and pursuing it like it’s an art form, like it’s our life’s work, a seismic shift occurs inside our being. When we expand our capacity and depth for sensuality in every realm of life, when we connect with our bodies and our senses from love instead of a whip of rigid discipline, something significant transforms in our tastes, our movement, our energetic flavour, our very style of living, experiencing and being. It unlocks magnetism.

This is especially true for women’s bodies and spirits. Women are designed for sincere devotion, not severe discipline. They bloom in one and wither in the other. When you unlearn extreme ‘wellness’ culture that makes Good & Evil out of food, the mother of all glow ups ensue. Diet culture the way I’ve encountered it often teaches you a paradigm of ‘diet’ and ‘cheat’ like it’s a scale of morality that comes with jury and judgement. When you are cleansed (funny to use that word here, yes) of living in alternating states of strict suppression and ratchet feral indulgence in your relationship to food, it changes how you eat and how your body digests things.

Being afraid that you’ll drink seven litres of Coca Cola in one sitting and die if you dropped your strict ‘diet’ mindset for one moment, being afraid you’ll fall asleep for fourteen nights and never ever do anything ever again if you dare give yourself one break, one moment of rest or just one slower week, these extremist imaginations are the work of a traumatised mind in a cage.

When we slowly, deftly, patiently and lovingly do the depth work of rewiring ourselves to be in reverent relationship with pleasure, sensuality, aliveness and softer living, we are in rebirth. Chances are, you will honestly not even *feel* like choosing a margarine ridden factory line Domino’s abomination over a wood fired sourdough pizza with real tomatoes for sauce and mozzarella that someone actually bothered to craft. You will have an affogato now and then (sugar!! coffee!!) and you’ll still have radiant, healthy skin. You will probably have ghee again. You’ll fry pakoras at home in the monsoon, and you’ll not eat them like a teacher is going to come around and beat you up with a cane. Maybe, if your cultural environment allows for it, like me, you’ll eat meat again and return to the most alive you have felt in years.

Of course, we all have our health conditions and journeys, and they will often demand varying levels of ‘strictness’ as well as devotion from us in ways that nobody else can figure out on our behalf. It is an addiction to extremity that would make an invitation to softly lean into pleasure sound like you’re being asked to abandon all discernment and jump headlong into hedonism that will bring your downfall.

Maybe you’ll simply learn the art of romancing pleasure, decadence, abundance and abandon again, you’ll figure out how it fits into your life and your specific experience, and in your own unique way you’ll see how the mindset you eat anything with is the frequency your body digests it with.

How we do one thing is how we do everything, isn’t it? When we attune to real pleasure, we no longer chase drug-like ‘fixes’ of processed junk and sneeze-length climaxes. In my experience, that desire for forbidden, ‘dopamine injected straight into my veins’ type of ultraprocessed junk gets out of your system real quick when your body learns that pleasure, pleasurable experiences and real, beautiful food that tastes fucking good is normal, safe and abundant.

I have a lot of further reading, recommendations and discovery to share with you on this.

~ Mireille Guiliano’s book on the French way of living in wholesome, pleasure-centric health. It’s called French Women Don’t Get Fat. Yes, icky title, but it was written in a time we weren’t offended by literally everything. I highly recommend ignoring that and experiencing the wellspring of nutritional wisdom from French culture that this book offers. It has the loveliest recipes, too.

~ Entering the realm of Emmie Rae’s The Daily Rest Studio and her Substack

~ Peta Kelly’s Honeycomb

~ The War Kitchen, this is the only account on Instagram I ever want to see again.

~ A podcast I heard many moons ago that I may have already recommended quite a few times:

~ Watching these ‘What I eat at my Nonna’s house in Italy’ videos that have just captured my whole heart and given me a glimpse of a truly sumptuous, wholesome way of living.

~ I might as well go out on a limb here and add, Are We Entering a New Romantic Era?

Love,

O