Meeting with “Colorfoodnutri”

https://www.instagram.com/colorfoodnutri

This meeting happened today when I was creating my own Instagram account and came across hers. Her name is Paola, and she is originally from Nicaragua, where she practices. She is a nutritionist who specializes in ED; she started as a classical nutritionist, but she began making changes because she saw how manyw many people suffer from diet-related problems. After all, they felt they weren’t losing weight the way they wanted, which frustrated her. She also realized something very common among nutritionists: their body is their presentation card. They need to look thin to be able to get patients, and this led to her having some risky behavior around foods and to different effects, which I think is very important to look at because even though this was painful and not great, it made her have to change in some way, which was to look at intuitive eating differently. She faced a lot of struggles when she started with her community because, even though she is from Guatemala and she was trying to get patients there when she started working, specifically around the focus on eating disorders and intuitive eating, most of her patients stopped going to her.

Most of her new clientele was from other countries because they didn’t feel it was okay to go to a nutritionist who was only an expert in making you lose weight. When she said this it really made me think because it my house there has always been this saying from my parents and grandparents that you do not go to a fat nutritionist because that means they are not doing things correctly but know that I have been studying this process I realize that this is a horrible assumption to have because as I have been learning and as should be known being fat or of a larger size does not mean that you are in any way unhealthy or that they suffer from anything in correlation with this which leads me to think about how important it is to fight this because the idea that you are not healthy unless you look a certain way is not just wrong but I would say it is dangerous. She also spoke a lot about the fact that on her page she does not just post about EDs because she feels that there are a lot of people suffering with their body image and eating habits and have normalized it to the point that they do not realize they are sick and work perfectly. So she wants people to look for her not just when they are sick, but at the issue as a whole to have the biggest impact possible. At the end of our conversation, I asked her what the biggest barrier or issue was about my project, where I want to incorporate some design, and what thoughts she had. She told me that, the references we have it is important to have corporal diversity with people when they are looking for clothing and how they want to feel with their bodies the ideas that they have are of thin people there is a lot more diversity now but this is something that actually makes people feel as if they have permission to feel good about their body it is not just thinking that they are the only ones that have that specific body type which is essential. When people go to stores, they find sizes from L to XL. Still, clothing sizes aren’t consistent, and that has a large connection to body dysmorphia because how is there not going to be body dysmorphia in the world when I am different sizes in different stores. Make sure clothing is accessible, and there are a lot of stores that don’t have a wide range. After the conversation, she told me that if I ever needed more support, I could reach out to her again, and she really appreciated that I spoke to her. 

After analyzing everything I saw in this conversation, I realized there is a major issue with sizing, and it is not just because of this specific conversation, but because people put a lot of emphasis on it. For example, a lot of times people don’t look at what size they actually are. Still, they buy based on what size they want to be, so they buy the jeans or the shirt that might be tight, thinking they are going to lose weight, and I am fully honest: this is something I did as well because I thought this was the only way I would be loved. I also see her point on the standardization of sizes because why are there such different sizes at different stores? Why does not everyone follow the same measurements? However, I understand this as well because a brand has its identity, so it is important to make sure that identity is inclusive.