Body Talk

The Today Show regular Lyndi Cohen used to loathe her body. Now she loves it. Find out how she flipped her relationship with food in her new book, The Nude Nutritionist.

At only 11 years old, Lyndi Cohen was on a diet – obsessed with the idea of eating well. By the time she turned 21, she knew everything there was to know about nutrition. Even so, she struggled.

“I’d have a good breakfast and lunch but, by the afternoon, I’d come home stressed and tired and end up eating everything I could. I got into this really negative pattern where I’d become so upset by trying to eat healthily that I actually found it really hard to stay on the bandwagon,” Lyndi says.

“I think it’s something a lot of people struggle with – trying to eat healthily and be consistent. So often we take healthy eating to the extreme, to the point where it stops being healthy.”

It was only when Lyndi started to relax around food that she was able to stop being emotionally tied to it and lose 20 kilograms in the process.

“It was something I did over four years and it had nothing to do with weighing myself or stressing about what I eat,” Lyndi says.

“As soon as you step away from the scales, and away from what you look like, it’s so much easier to maintain healthy habits because you actually love your body. It’s when you try and look after a body that you hate that it’s really hard. You can only maintain that for so long.

“When you love your body you exercise because you enjoy it and you eat well because it makes you feel good – not because you’re feeling guilty about what you ate for dinner last night. Your relationship with food and your body have to shift and, when it does, it’s pretty amazing.”

In The Nude Nutritionist, Lyndi shares no-nonsense advice, case studies and simple strategies as well as more than 50 healthy recipes using everyday ingredients.

“One of the things I used to do is create a list of bad or forbidden foods,” Lyndi recalls.

“But all that happened was that it left me craving them. It was much more useful to create a list of foods that I wanted to eat more of. In this way, you don’t end up feeling deprived.”

Lyndi doesn’t believe in cutting out all the “fun” ingredients like salad dressing and sauces either.

“If adding sauce helps you eat more vegetables, go for it! I’m not one of those nutritionists who recommends you cut out sugar, or go cold turkey on alcohol for a month,” Lyndi says.

“I think it’s much more sustainable to start to adopt more healthy habits that feel easy and enjoyable as part of your lifestyle.”

And that may start with spending less time on social media…

“People can easily spend two to three hours a day on an app like Instagram absorbing content that keeps them stuck in the comparison trap.

“For me, I needed to have a much bigger goal than just what I looked like to turn things around.

“Learning to love my body was a process of prioritising my health over the number on the scales.”

www.lyndicohen.com

INTERVIEW: KYLIE DAVIS

PHOTOGRAPHS: LUCA PRODIGO