I’m not sure when this need to rebirth food as something to be savored and celebrated became a passionate pursuit. Maybe it started with my raw food journey. Instead of reveling in the pleasure of eating more fresh fruits and vegetables in all their splendor, a meal became a contest and anything less than 100 percent raw was somehow deemed less nourishing than its cooked counterpart. I’d watch raw food enthusiasts order a salad of iceberg lettuce and olives (hold the dressing) because nothing else on the menu met their raw food standards. Not even the most beautiful array of steamed vegetables drizzled with miso lemon vinaigrette. . .
Perhaps it started in nutrition school where, with each new malady we examined, one or more “safe” foods dropped off the healthy food repertoire until there was, well, barely anything left to eat and enjoy. 
Oh no, wait. It had to be the day I sat across from a very anxious client. She’d scheduled an appointment because she’d been binging and she needed support.
Me: “So tell me, what are you binging on?”
Client: “Sweet potatoes and salmon.”
I was expecting to hear something like Oreo cookies or potato chips. This gal was trying desperately to maintain an extremely low fat, raw food diet and her body was screaming for something very different.
Then the “clean theme” took the nutritional world by storm. Detox classes became all the rage and you couldn’t blink without seeing yet another workshop or teleclass on cleansing or juice fasting. (In my opinion, cleansing has become the new diet—it just sounds sexier.) I felt compelled to run my own class. I called it “The Real Dirt on Detox.” Basically, I showed people how to clean up their diets instead of their bodies. What a novel thought.
But what really bothered me about this cleansing frenzy was the implication that food was somehow dirty and enjoying food was a sin to be cleansed. I’d leave a restaurant in New York City—a mecca of culinary delights—and one of my dining companions would lament, “I can’t believe I ate the edamame.” Not even, “I can’t believe I ate the triple hot fudge sundae with red dye number 7 maraschino cherries.” Even those darling little soybeans had become the enemy.
The cumulative effect of this cascade of mind-boggling, body-blasting episodes brought forth a striking revelation: I was a living example of this contemporary food paradox. Here I was a foodie, delighting in all things culinary. At the same time, I had spent most of my adult life trying every new diet that came down the pike, ignoring both my intuition and my foodie sensibility.
It was like a giant wake-up call punctuated by the stream of clients who started coming to me to help them lose weight, cleanse, grow smaller, when all I really wanted to do was give them permission to eat.
I think there’s a better way to approach nutrition and health. I plan to lighten up the conversation. And I’m starting with chocolate.
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