Yasmine Jameelah: How did you get into the nutrition space?
Dr: Kera: I grew up in France with a Caribbean mother and African father. Food has always been a very important way of connecting with my cultural identity, as it is in many Black families. At the same time, I was raised to be very conscious of the importance of having rigid control of my food intake. I would say that my parents were kind of obsessed with weight and eating right. And I grew up with a mother who’s been dieting most of her life. And I was even brought up at 13 to be good on my first diet. So this family obsession with food probably paved the way to my career as a nutritionist. And I definitely picked up on this obsession with food and body image. So I knew very young, at 17, I knew I wanted to be a nutritionist. But because I grew up in an agricultural region in France called Britain, I did not enter the nutrition field by the standard curriculum. I started by studying food science and agricultural science.
View this post on Instagram
That curriculum really helped me connect with food, understand how it was produced, and how it was transformed before having it on my plate. So I didn’t start by studying the calories or the protein; I started by understanding and asking how is it made? Who are the people who are making this food? And when you work with farmers, they have a totally different relationship with food. Right? And it really helped me reframe my relationship with food before I started going into the hard nutrition part of my curriculum after. And so, this is how I started. And then, during my nutrition training, I noticed very early online that all the food was centered around Eurocentric food. I felt like, okay, this is a lot of Eurocentric food, but I just accepted it because it’s how it is. You just take notes and get your degree and do whatever you’re supposed to do. But then, a year after I defended my Ph.D., I felt the need to bridge my expertise in nutrition and my own food culture for myself.
BlackLove.com Related Articles:
Your Health Matters: Immune-Boosting Breakfast Recipe
Kevin Curry of ‘Fit Men Cook’ Shares His Emotional Journey With Food and Depression
We’re Obsessed With This Vegan Mac and Cheese Recipe From Tabitha Brown. You Will Be Too.
Then I moved to the U.S. in 2015 to East Orange, NJ, which has a large Caribbean community. I started to connect with a lot of people for coaching, and every time I’m helping someone, I start to ask them, okay, what’s your biggest struggle with food? And every time they’d say, “my biggest struggle is I have a Caribbean food problem. I have an African food problem.” And my response was, “Who is telling you that cultural food is a problem?” It took me maybe five years, from 2015 to 2020, to understand what was going on. I was listening to them, trying to help them, and trying to understand what was going on because I had that feeling at some point. And this is a funny thing to read and to reflect on who I was also. And I decided to create an intrinsic program that would empower the Black community to reclaim cultural foods and for Black women to nurture their bodies and take care of their bodies, but with kindness. That was very important because every time I was listening, there was a lot of restriction, deprivation, and punishment of their body.
Yasmine Jameelah: Absolutely. So one of the things that I just heard you say is that a lot of your teachings have been with Black people and Black women. Is there a space for Black women to desire to keep their cultural foods close to them but also desire to be healthier simultaneously?
View this post on Instagram
Dr. Kera: That’s a very important question because that’s the first question I asked myself. How I’m going to address that, knowing that there is a strong desire to lose weight in the Black community that I understand. I understand where it’s coming from. And I think most Black women are not given any choices in wanting to lose weight. So this is very important. I also need to think about my ethics as a professional and what I know about nutrition, what I know about restrictive diets, restricting behavior, and how it doesn’t work. Yeah. So it’s a hard balance I have to find in my communication. And so first thing, I would start by kind of challenging the relationship between thinness and health. So every time people are going to say, I want to be healthier, I will always challenge and try to help people understand that losing weight doesn’t necessarily mean being healthier because I know because I work with a lot of women who’ve been dining since they were a child that it’s absolutely the contrary. It can be the contrary. And also, health is not just physical health; it’s emotional health, and mental health. And we know that food has a big, big impact on those aspects. And those restrictive diets, they’re not necessarily healthier. If we think about health holistically, that’s the first thing. I also want them to understand that even if you’re healthy, we live in a society that doesn’t allow us to be healthy or as Black people because of systemic oppression because of so many things. We can talk about those desires to lose weight, but I also need to be true and tell them the truth about what we know about diets.
And they’re not helpful. And I decided as a professional that it would be unethical to use my power and my knowledge to push them in that. And so what I always say to my clients is, first we need to understand what your relationship with food, what happened, your history, because whatever you want to do, whatever your goal, even if it’s to lose weight, understanding your relationship with food is going to be so important. And feeling that every single feeling of guilt and shame, took a lot because I realized it was the biggest thing I heard from clients. We need to address that. And then we can talk about weight loss. We can talk about reducing one or addressing diabetes, cholesterol, and all those health issues that are important that I understand. But personally, I have a network of practitioners that I know, including Black dieticians, that I would refer them to because I don’t do weight loss; I’ve done it in the past. But I think there is a space, but it’s very important also to challenge those desires and be aware of where we’re going. And I have clients after my program who said, okay, I want to lose weight, but the way they approach it is completely different.
Yasmine Jameelah: This is a great segue into eating disorders. What would you tell anyone who’s discovered they have an eating disorder, and what steps can they take to reckon with that? Because culturally, there’s often this assumption that eating disorders are a struggle that a certain demographic and body type experiences, when there are vastly different examples of eating disorders that impact many communities, including ours.
View this post on Instagram
Dr. Kera: Yes, I think we definitely need to name it, and even myself, even if I’m a professional, naturally, it took me a long time to name it and say, hey, these are eating disorders. When I started to work on that space, I actually wasn’t aware that I was in that disordered space. And I feel people need to understand that there is a spectrum because very often, people see the extreme of someone who is struggling with bulimia or isn’t eating at all. And yes, these are eating disorders, but people need to understand that it exists in a spectrum, and there are many different layers. Most of us living in the society we live in, we have some sort of disordered eating. So what I usually do is explain the spectrum so that they understand and ask very tangible questions about the behavior and then let them know that they can be helped.
For example, in my family, if there’s a cookout (because I know cookout season is coming), people laugh about how much they’re going to eat and having a food coma afterward, but that’s a binge. We laugh and joke about not eating before holiday celebrations, but if we dig a little bit deeper, we realize that no, it’s disordered eating. We need to break the stereotype of what is an eating disorder, how people understand the layers from normal eating to disorder eating. And we also need to discuss commenting on our bodies, the way we eat, that we need to skip a meal or feel that we need to go to the gym or run more to deserve to eat.
Yasmine Jameelah: Let’s talk about your social media for a moment because I love how you share different examples of what it means to have a balanced diet and the various photos you show, and even how you challenge these thoughts of what is healthy. One of my favorite posts that you shared is that society says that kale is a superfood, but collard greens are unhealthy. You challenged the way that we describe soul food in comparison to cuisine from other cultures where we use words like “rich” and “decadent,” but for our cuisine, we don’t use that language. Was there a turning point where you realized that?
Dr. Kera: I think I’ve always been aware because I grew up in France, and I always realized that depending on the way I’m perceived, I’m going to get different reactions when I’m in the US. I am a Black woman, but I’m also French and grew up in a European country. I grew up eating bread with every meal. I ate dairy, cream, etc., so I was always aware. But because I’m a researcher, I used to only talk to other researchers. In my area of expertise, there is a kind of diagram. It’s a triangle, a different sphere, and you have the top. And this is where I’m supposed to work to the top. So I’ve always been aware of what happened at the bottom, the population level. And it wasn’t supposed to be my role as a researcher to talk about those things. It’s more the role of the physician. But the issue is what I realized is that people that don’t listen to us, they don’t trust researchers or physicians; they trust influencers. And so I said okay, I know what I have to do then to get them to believe then because I’m tired.
Yasmine Jameelah: With this new level of awareness, there’s a generation of Black parents who want to teach their children different values. Can we teach our children to have a healthy relationship with food and their bodies?
Dr. Kera: I think so. There is a way, but it’s not easy. I feel we need to understand as parents, we need to provide a structure for kids to eat a balanced diet and build a healthy relationship with food. And I think it’s very important to understand that the relationship with food is more important. Because this is the foundation they’re going to use their whole life. So you have to understand that if you control everything a kid has on display, it’s going to last for maybe 15 years. At some point, they’re going to have the freedom to buy whatever they want and do whatever they want. So if you are too controlling, what’s going to happen is rebellious eating. And so when they’re going to go to college, for example, on their own, they’re going to eat whatever they want, and they won’t actually won’t know how to eat those foods. And so, as a parent, the way I see that, I provide a structure so that they understand that they can have a structure, but inside that structure, I want them to have the freedom to do whatever they want.
View this post on Instagram
So what it can look like is not necessarily rewarding them with sweets but introducing chocolates in candy in a very neutral in the way we talk about food, not necessarily a treat, like candy, something that you enjoy. And the other thing I do a lot is cooking. So going to the farmers market and seeing fruits and vegetables. Showing my children how food grows, that helps a lot keep, and kids love that — understanding how food is made. Also, what matters with kids a lot is exposure. So even if your kid doesn’t want broccoli, because my son, he hates broccoli. And I’m still offering broccoli because I know one day maybe he’s going to eat it like he now does with shrimp which he didn’t like for a while. You need to provide opportunity to introduce your kids to new foods so they can know what their preferences are because they don’t know what’s happening. I’m also trying to focus him on understanding body sensation, what we call awareness of the body.
So to give you an example, my son loves chocolate milkshakes. So the first time he had a chocolate milkshake, it was very sweet. He drank the whole thing, and he had a terrible stomach ache. And I asked him, “how does it feel in your body?” Instead of monitoring and micromanaging his quantity, I just spent time on his body sensation and how he felt. And the next time he had one, he just ate a little bit and gave it to me and said, I won’t drink it all because it won’t feel good. So instead of pushing the notion of portion control that I don’t really trust at all, showing children to trust their bodies, actually, that their bodies are actually communicating with us every day and that he doesn’t have to finish his plate to clean his plate. He’s full. Or maybe he wants something else. He wants something sweet. It’s fine. But to learn to teach children that their body can be trusted and they don’t need to be punished or micromanaged, I’m just learning to listen to them at a very young age. It’s actually helpful. And I sit with my son, and he definitely listens.
Also, I don’t want to talk about poop too much, but this is very important to understand. My son and I also talk about feeling constipated, and I’ll say okay, if we add a little bit of vegetable even if you don’t like it, you’re going to feel better after. And he understands. Kids understand that very well. Understanding how food impacts your body not only physically but also emotionally. That lollipop. It makes you happy? Let’s have one. And then we move on. We don’t need to say, “you eat so much sugar, blah, blah, blah.” Because then kids are all going to love sugar. Right? But it’s our responsibility to provide a structure so that they are offered a variety of different food. And with time, I thought that’s the most efficient way so that they have nutrition and they will keep for themselves. And then, when they will be alone on their own, they will be able to make the choices on their own without feeling pressure, without binging on food. We can build balance and learn to trust our bodies.
To learn more about Dr. Kera Nyemb-Diop’s work, contact her here and follow her on Instagram.
JOIN THE CONVERSATION