“I’m really jazzed up about simplifying things.” says Jesse Haas, Functional Nutritionist and co-founder of Wellness Minneapolis.
Jesse shares her knowledge during an interview on the Well Connected Twin Cities Podcast to help us all understand what making food easy could look like.
While the amount of information we know about how food impacts our bodies is staggering, most people still find making confident food choices really difficult.
“What I see is this desire [in nutrition] to hack the code and fix the problem, and in so doing we’re making it too hard.”
jesse haas
“To show up at the grocery store and the dinner table and know how to feed yourself is a lost art,” says Jesse. Instead we’ve cultivated an uncertainty and a fear around choosing the wrong thing.
The answer isn’t in the information, Jesse tells me. Even studying nutrition since 2007 still leaves her feeling like she’s only scratched the surface.
Ultimately they just see so much information, misinformation on food, nutrition and diet. . . that it’s just overwhelming and confusing, and I don’t think that’s necessary.
Jesse Haas
Jesse drops a huge truth. . . she explains that the way we feel about the food we eat determines how it interacts functionally within our bodies.
Woah.
So just how can we make nutrition simple?
- Cultivate Confidence. Jesse says this confidence is possible through building awareness and understanding the function of our food. Food can be a tool that works for us, instead of seeing ourselves at the mercy of our food. We have control!
- Notice Your Relationship With Food. Especially as female-presenting people, we can experience guilt, shame, and punishment around food.
Jesse iterates that food is not binary, it is neither good nor bad. Instead, it can be a tool to cultivate wellbeing. - Define Your “Soft Edges”. Jesse says creating “soft-edges” around food makes your approach more realistic and sustainable. Soft-edges simply means there are no absolute rules you HAVE to follow ALL the time. Practice giving yourself the space to say yes to special meaningful foods like birthday cake.
Food is diet, but not “dieting“. There is no “all or nothing”. It’s not full time, all the time. There is an opportunity to live well AND celebrate food.
“[Functional Nutrition] is about how to bring food to the people and how to bring peace to the people about the food.”
Jesse haas
Jesse encourages us to ditch food guilt + shame, embrace celebration, and build a positive relationship with our food and the future of our wellbeing.
You can hear the details of the conversation on the Well Connected Twin Cities Podcast, including more on her motivation to start an interdisciplinary clinic in Minneapolis and her unique partnership with Doomtree’s producer, Lazerbeak.