Want a joyful, connected relationship with food?

I love Deena’s approach, and in this chat I spoke to her about how to process our own relationships with food, how to not project them onto our children, as well as about diet culture, anti-fat bias, whether food is really neutral and how to partner with our children around food.

I am ALL for making food a joyful and connected experience, rather than one full of restriction, arbitrary rules and moral judgments! Who isn’t?

A bit about Deena: Deena Barselah is a Holistic and Integrative Health Coach who guides mothers and families all over the world to remove the chore from food and cultivate a more joyful, connected, easier, and confident relationship with food.  She's supported her own disordered eating, autoimmune conditions, and chronic digestive distress with gentle shifts in diet, habits, nervous system healing, and truly learning how to trust her body.  Deena believes there's no one-size-fits-all to food and that by cultivating a system that works well for your unique body and family, you can let go of the "shoulds" that weigh you down.  She lives in Encinitas, CA with her husband and son.  Previously, Deena worked in the corporate world in areas of Organizational Psychology and People Development.  

You can find Deena ⁠at her website⁠, or ⁠on instagram⁠ (She is currently on an IG hiatus, but her account is still full of helpful, informative content!)

NOTE: You can read a transcript of this interview below, but please bear in mind I don’t edit the transcript and so it won’t always be accurate!

Hi, I'm here today with Deena Barselah.

And I'm super excited about this conversation because we've been we've been waiting a while to make it happen.

And yeah, I'm just gonna let Deena say a little bit about who she is, what she does and how she came to do this work.

Great, thank you so much for having me.

This is like long overdue, and I'm so glad to be here.

So yes, I live in Encinitas, California, Southern California with my husband and my eight-year-old son.

And we are a homeschooling, unschooling, whatever label you want to apply type of family.

And I am a certified holistic health coach and I've been working in integrative health coaching for almost 14 years now.

And my journey to that really started in early childhood where I grew up.

I'm 43 years old, so I grew up in the 80s and 90s.

with every woman around me, either very distinctly being on a diet or off a diet.

And when I say distinctly, it was very clear whether they were, you know, off the plan, kind of cheating, not paying attention to what they should be like all of those strong, all of those words and sentiments, feelings is what I grew up with.

And then or they were on a diet and they were being really strict and talking about what they couldn't eat and what they shouldn't eat.

And it was never to I'd like to be really clear that this was never put on me explicitly, where I know that that is the case for a lot of people.

But as a very highly sensitive, deep feeling person, very aware of the feelings of everybody around me, and that's just how I came into the world and the kind of like a hyper vigilant,

I get that there's a place for me to just not rock the boat and make people happy and be the good girl.

That's how I came into this world and with different things going on in my family.

And so as that person, I also was very attuned.

To all the language and all the feelings around food.

And it was just, you know, it was every, it was my mom, my mom's friends, my friend's moms, my teachers.

It was literally every woman was talking about it this way.

And that's how I grew up.

And then as I, like I said, as a very highly sensi