What we can learn about health from Gordon Ramsay
Have you ever seen Kitchen Nightmares?
This tv show starring Gordon Ramsay was fascinating to me.
I wonder if you might be able to see the similarities between Kitchen Nightmares and going on a diet.
Each episode of Kitchen Nightmares focuses on a different restaurant.
This restaurant has been run down to the ground over the years.
- The cleanliness has slipped
- The owners are terrible bosses
- The chefs have lost motivation
- The servers are ashamed to be working there.
The restaurant is your body in this analogy.
Gordon Ramsay, the famous chef, barges into the restaurant making promises of success.
He claims that he can turn the restaurant around and make the necessary changes so that the restaurant is shiny and new again.
He knows the secret to finally making the restaurant successful.
Gordon Ramsay is your new diet.
Gordon inspects the current situation:
- Reacting with disgust, horror, and anger
- Overhauls all of the old food
- Shames the staff members
- He yells at the owner until he’s red in the face
- The staff vows to do better, to be better, to improve their skills so they’ll make Chef Ramsay proud.
Have you ever vowed to start over again and overhaul all of your food choices? Have you reacted with shame and disgust to your body?
Ramsay brings in a design crew to make over the restaurant beautifully, he provides 1 or 2 in depth trainings to the staff members, and then proclaims that the restaurant is fixed!! He gave them the key to success and now there’s a wonderful happy ending.
Except there isn’t.
Looking back in 2023, 0% of the restaurants in season one and two are still open.
The overall success rate of the 7 seasons is ~16%. So that means there is an 84% failure rate. How could that be?
My thought is that perhaps the quick fix didn’t work. Maybe Gordon Ramsay screaming and huffing and puffing and being really mean to the staff doesn’t actually turn a toxic restaurant into a healthy environment.
What does that mean for you?
In order to actually treat the restaurant (your body) with respect and give it a chance of finding success, you start with the foundation.
Together we can look at the foundation of your nutrition with curiosity and non-judgement, not criticism and shame.
When we can honestly look at the things that have actually gotten the restaurant (your body) to where it is, it’s years of habits that have been formed for one reason or another. It’s a mindset that’s been molded by diet culture and our parents and many other factors and it makes sense why it’s there!
We would be doing a disservice to your body by putting it through another Kitchen Nightmare.
- What if you could treat the restaurant staff with respect instead of disdain?
- What if there were no more power struggles in the restaurant?
- What if you could build new systems, leading to a mindset that leads to long lasting change that brings joy into your life?
If you’re curious about this, I’d love to chat!
