"For so many people, food is such a damaged place"
An interview + special collab with movement specialist Cadence Dubus
Hello, still from upstate (legit about to WFHT—work from hot tub)! I’ve got something a little different for you today that I’m really excited to share.
Those of you who follow me for the food may not know that I have a passion for movement and a regular movement practice that involves a mix of mat Pilates, kettlebells, fascia work, stretching, breath work, and lots of walking and riding my bike. My movement practice is sacred to me—it keeps me curious about my body, helps me manage my anxiety, and informs what I crave and how I feed myself day-to-day, and in that way is so intertwined with my cooking practice; it’s cheesy, but both help bring me back to myself.
I largely credit Cadence Dubus, founder of the virtual Pilates and strength studio Brooklyn Strength, for helping me develop a sustainable and regular movement practice. I always leave her classes feeling stronger, more centered, and having learned something new about my body. I love that she teaches strength as a tool for fighting the patriarchy/colonialism, and I love being amidst all kinds of bodies in her virtual classes.
Cadence also happens to love food, like me. I am absolutely thrilled to announce that I will be collaborating with her this fall for a food and movement program called Nourish Yourself, a seven-week series meant to support anyone who has ever struggled with knowing how to feed yourself in a way that supports you and fosters a gentler, more peaceful relationship with food and cooking.
As in previous years she’s offered this program, Cadence will offer three pre-recorded self-paced workshops that cover the basics of nutrition, diet/weight gain/weight loss misinformation, and, my personal favorite, digestion. You’ll also get four 30-minute private sessions with Cadence to use over the seven weeks.
New to program this year is, well, me! I’ll be providing guidance and tips on grocery shopping, maximizing your pantry, mastering basic cooking techniques, and making practical and efficient meals. I’ll also have a few recipes in the mix. Everyone who signs up for Nourish Yourself will be in a private group chat with me and Cadence, where we can share recipes and resources, you can ask us questions, cheer each other on, and, of course, post food pics.
Nourish Yourself runs from Sept 16 – Oct 28, 2023. Keep your eyes out for an early bird purchase link I’ll send out Monday to Gentle Foods subscribers. The early bird price is $575; after Sept 8, the regular course price will be $675.
I’ve dreamed of doing something like this with Cadence for a long time and am so excited to be making it a reality. If you’re someone who is interested in a more joyful, curious, and peaceful relationship with food and want a fun and supportive community to engage with on your journey, I hope you’ll consider joining us.
In the meantime, I want to leave you with a little Q&A I did with Cadence recently to better introduce her to the Gentle Foods community. Happy weekend and I’ll see you all here next week.
[This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.]
So first I would love to know a bit about the history of your relationship to food, because it's clearly something that is important to you.
Totally. That’s a giant question.
The good history is that both my parents cooked when I was growing up; my dad's from the South and my mom is a New Yorker who grew up in a household that was really into food. So there was a lot of food appreciation and food was never seen as a bad thing in our household. And I'm really grateful for that because I think for so many people either you don't get introduced to a lot of food as a child or you get introduced to good food/bad food mentality and I just feel really fortunate that, for whatever reason, my parents just didn't do that.
Then when I was a teenager, I started cooking a little bit. I remember the first cookbook I ever used was called something like, “1,001 Pasta Recipes.” And I learned to make a really basic tomato sauce from scratch, like stewing the tomatoes with onions and garlic, really basic. But I was just amazed.
And then the spring before I turned 16, my father died very suddenly. And basically after a year to the month that that happened, I was unable to digest anything. At the time, people called it irritable bowel or something, even though it was clearly so obviously from the stress and grief and anxiety, plus being a teenager and who knows what else, and nobody was asking me those questions. I was just trying to find out if I was gluten intolerant and all this bullshit.
That really put me on a trajectory of trying to understand food and nutrition, because when you have digestive issues that's just your whole life. I was just in discomfort so often. Looking back on that I'm like yeah, I basically had just raging anxiety that was just in my gut. So from there, I started really getting interested in whole foods.
As a digestion management response?
Yeah. And I just got really interested in the quality of food. I started influencing everybody in our household to buy whole grain stuff. And I just went down a whole rabbit hole. I used to eat only grains for days at a time—like classic mono diets in Chinese medicine and also Ayurveda in which you only eat grains to soothe your system.
I got super into traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture and learned all about the energetic qualities of food and interacting with food as a living thing.
But that also, because I was a miserable teenager heading into college, definitely kind of hardened into being really afraid of processed food and afraid of sugar and you know the things that we do to ourselves when we're younger, all the boundaries just get really fixed and you don't know how to hold nuance in any way.
In a funny way, I basically taught myself what now people would call intuitive eating. I just went about it on my own, which is very par for the course. I have rarely had guides in my life, which I think is a big part of my teaching. I really want to be that for other people because I needed that so much so many times in my life. And when I would advocate for myself and went to people saying “I need help, I’m struggling,” I just got radio silence. And that was so disappointing and so difficult that I really hope I can be that for other people. That’s a real driver for me to hold that space for people.
I feel like as I've gotten older the maturing that I did broke me out of hard structures like “no sugar” and now I just want to enjoy life. Like when I go to Europe, I feel like my goal is to sit places and watch people and try and soak in and just learn from everyone else. And I'm like, oh, look at these people who are just having a glass of wine at three in the afternoon, and they're relaxed about it and they're not like, Oh, my God, I drank in the middle of the day, the rest of my day is shot and I can't go for my run or whatever. They're just enjoying life, you know.
So how do I integrate that into my very American, New York City fast-paced lifestyle? For me, that looks like cooking, being part of the co-op, going to farmers markets, trying to get my food at places I value.
How long have you been offering Nourish Yourself as a service? I'm curious about how that makes sense as a module within your practice.
A long time ago, I added these holistic health sessions to my services that just continued to develop as I kept getting messages from people who were interested.
I find that for so many people, food is such a damaged place. I see them make so much progress physically with me and getting in touch with themselves, and then on the sidelines I'll kind of hear the language that they're using around food or just recognizing that it seems like there's still a lot of lack of information or skill around cooking or food and organizing their meals. And to me food is life, like food is how we engage with the world, with our bodies. You're literally taking what's in the outside and turning it into you. It's pretty amazing.
I also work with a lot of younger clients these days and it really motivates me when I talk to someone in their twenties who's already starting to work on and untangle this stuff. I'm just like, what if I could help you be able to feed yourself with grace and understanding, and then you can just tune out the bullshit for the rest of your goddamn life? Like what power, you know? I just feel like, especially as women or female presenting people, the messaging that we get that constantly tells us our bodies are wrong is designed to hold us down and hold us back. To make women obsess about their food every day, that's literally just like wasted mental and physical energy that we could be putting into other things. And it enrages me.
Part of this program that's hard to articulate is that I fully understand that when a lot of people reach out to me, they want to be part of this program, but they also do want to lose weight. But what I always say to people is if your food is really disorganized, you're just in a whirlpool and have no idea which way is up. You might lose weight because you might be going from a state of zero organization to just starting to really tune into yourself, organize your meals, and better understand your hunger. That may result in you losing weight. But so often when people are talking about losing weight it's really more of a commentary about how they want to feel in their life and just feel better, confident, relaxed, and comfortable in their body, and so that becomes this catch-all phrase, “Oh, I want to lose weight.”
Yeah, which is a good segue into my next question: Who is the kind of person who is drawn to this class? And what are some of the patterns you notice? Skipping breakfast immediately comes to mind.
The people that are drawn to this are not starting at zero, right? They don't need to watch Super Size Me. They're educated. They've read stuff. They like to go out and eat good food. They've got some yummy things in their house already. They're not, you know, a bachelor with an empty fridge and zero idea how to boil water.
Usually it's somebody who has had disordered eating in the past, which I would say we all did or do. And they've recovered from that enough that they're like, well, I'm not doing my binge/restrict behaviors anymore, but now I don't know what to do. I don't know what a regular plate looks like. I don't know what a “healthy” meal really is.
They have random ideas that there’s supposed to be lots of protein but no carbs or fat, like all these little buzzwords. They don't want to be on a diet anymore, but they also feel like whatever they’re currently doing isn't really supporting them.
There’s also a lot of fear, like “I don't want to give up stuff"—I don't want to give up bread, booze, you know. So there's already a lot of hesitance at looking more deeply at their nutrition because there's already an assumption that I must be doing it all wrong and I'm going to have to go on some kind of really restrictive terrible experience.
I trust the intelligence of the people that I work with. Often what I'm trying to do is help people just tune into themselves and their own awareness and their own innate intelligence. And if I give you the information that's not full of patriarchal garbage, I trust you can now take that and forge your path. And obviously I'm here to support you, but one of the workshops that we do is literally the basics of nutrition, just really understanding what is a carbohydrate and what does it do in your body and why do you need it? Now that you have that info, I think you can make good decisions about that and engage with that as a food group in a much more knowing, relaxed way.
Why were you looking to collaborate with a food person like me?
First of all, I just love people in the food industry and it's a world that I really appreciate. Having the perspective of someone who's coming to this from a place of food appreciation seems like a great perspective.
Obviously we've been working together for a while now, so I know that you have an engaged physical practice. So we are the clients, you know. We are the client that we want to to be joining us. I want people to just learn how to engage with and enjoy their food and somebody like yourself, that's like what you're trying to do. So we can bring those two perspectives together.
These kinds of programs are really exciting for me because we're just getting bigger and bigger in terms of addressing different areas of people's lives so that everything we do gets deeper. So now someone could be in the Nourish program, they could be in a Pilates class, like we're really addressing our bodies and our lives from all angles. That's really exciting to me because that's how people really make huge change. I’ve had clients that were on lots of anti-anxiety medication and then literally just learned to eat more regularly and they don't need the meds anymore because it turned out they weren't having panic attacks, they were just very hungry. I know more than one person that that's happened to. Those people now have skills they didn't have before, and they're going to pass those skills on to anyone else that they're talking to about that stuff. And that's huge.
Last question: What’s on your end-of-summer cooking bucket list? I saw on Instagram that you were roasting boatloads of beautiful tomatoes for winter.
At the end of summer, I’m picking as much as I can. I am hoarding all the tomatoes. We have these really amazing orange cherry tomatoes here that are so ridiculously sweet. They're like candy. So I've been roasting those and then just freezing them in freezer bags so that I have them for topping pizzas, making tomato-based sauces and stews.
And then I'm going to also do the plum tomatoes. I'm probably going to boil a bunch of those and freeze them and just have those instead of canned tomatoes.
And then I already froze two gallons of blueberries, but I'm going to try and get another two in the freezer. I’ve never made jam before because I’m scared of canning, but a friend up here was like, you can make freezer jam. So I’m going to try doing little sandwich bags of that because I do eat a lot of jam in the winter.
If you now love Cadence as much as I do, you can follow her on Instagram and listen to her podcast, Busy Body. I’ve dropped an early episode here in which she talks more about her food and body journey, in case you’re interested in hearing more.