Educating people to eat better – Taranaki Daily News

SIMON O’CONNOR/FAIRFAX NZ

Michelle Yandle has found getting back to her indigenous Canadian roots has helped her work out a healthy eating philosophy.

When New Plymouth’s Michelle Yandle talks about eating the way her indigenous Canadian ancestors ate she doesn’t mean filling up on buffalo.

It’s about getting back to a more plant based diet, with good quality protein from meat. Eating real food as often as possible, rather than specifically eating what her forebears ate, she says.

“Which is just about impossible.” 

Life’s too short to go without a little chocolate and red wine, Yandle says.

Besides, as she points out, life is too short to go without a little chocolate and some red wine.

READ MORE:
* Holistic nutrition coach Michelle Yandle releases a book about ancestral eating
* Michelle Yandle’s new cookbook Beyond the Bin available at Bin Inn
* The Wellness Project community centre is about to open in New Plymouth

Yandle, 38, a nutrition coach, is originally from Nova Scotia on Canada’s east coast. Her great grandmother was from the Mi’kmaq tribe.

Michelle Yandle encourages people to eat real food.

But Yandle doesn’t know much about her, because her family tried to hide the fact, she says.

“They destroyed a lot of the records. They didn’t want to admit they had indigenous blood. It was frowned upon and that’s why it’s so difficult to trace who my great grandmother was, where she lived. I only have one picture of her.”

But while the Mi’kmaq people would have eaten elk, caribou and maple syrup back in the day, Yandle grew up eating takeaways.

Theres is no one diet that suits everybody, Yandle says.

She was overweight until she was in my teens, she says. “My whole childhood basically. I can’t l think of a time when I wasn’t on a diet. By the time I was 14 I had probably been on as many diets as I was old. I started very young because I grew up in a family of dieters.”

Another downside of being an overweight child was being bullied and picked on at school – she was a “walking bullseye”.

“Plus, I had big thick bottle cap glasses and a perm, so that probably didn’t help,” she laughs. 

The turning point came when she was 12. After volunteering at the SPCA decided she didn’t want to eat animals. So, she became a vegetarian, which limited the takeaways she could eat, she says.

 “And being vegetarian I was eating differently to the family, so I had to learn to cook for myself.”

The combination of eating healthy foods and having a growth spurt, turned her into “this tall, lanky thing,” she says.

But it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that she combined her love of cooking with her healthy eating philosophy, her growing interest in her indigenous ancestry and her teaching experience to launch a new career.

Her first career was teaching at a French immersion primary school. French is spoken by 9 per cent of people in Nova Scotia. After marrying a Kiwi bloke she moved to New Zealand six years ago. Since then she has taught at schools in Taranaki including St Joseph’s, Tikorangi and Urenui.

It was easier to teach in English, she says.

“English is my first language, so my sense of humour could shine out a bit more. The schools here are beautiful. They don’t even compare with schools in Canada that I had seen.”

New Zealand schools were bright and colourful, compared to the institutional big brick buildings with beige walls she was used to. And while she loves that the kids are so much more outdoorsy here, she admits to being shocked the first time she saw the children running around with bare feet.

But too much paperwork and too many meetings combined with other factors to stress her out, she says.

“I thought, do I want to feel like this for the next 30 years of my life? I thought, what else am I passionate about? And I’ve always been passionate about nutrition and health.”

So she did an 18 month online course through the Institute for Integrated Nutrition, based in the US. It’s  a health coaching programme that was a little bit of nutrition and a lot of how to coach people.

She kept teaching while she was training, going from permanent to relieving to giving up when her new job got too busy, she says.

“Later I wanted a bit more in depth knowledge of nutrition so I studied with Holistic Performance Nutrition Institute, that’s in Auckland. It’s also an online course.”

Along the way she came across an article about an indigenous Canadian man who had been travelling around New Zealand talking about going back to his indigenous roots. He ate what his people had eaten and had lost weight and was feeling good, she says.

That was her ‘aha’ moment and she started investigating what her ancestors had eaten. This became a book called A Diet For 7 Generations. It includes 11 guidelines and some recipes, she says.

“The book is based on an indigenous philosophy, which states what you do today you need to consider seven generations into the future and I applied that to a health perspective.”

Her second book, Beyond the Bin, is a cookbook published by Bin Inn, who she works for as its healthy inspirations ambassador. There is a life-sized cut out of her in all Bin Inn stores, which was never one of her goals, she jokes.

Her role with Bin Inn includes travelling around the country doing workshops. And healthy eating workshops are on the agenda when she moves into the new Wellness Project community centre in Egmont St, which is due to open in August.

As a nutrition coach Yandle helps people break down the barriers that stop them eating healthy food.

She believes everyone knows intrinsically what they should be eating, she says.

“We know we shouldn’t have too much sugar, we know we need more vegetables. So I help them put that into action. Everyone has different barriers whether they may be time, stress, emotional eating. There’s millions. It’s quite fascinating. I help them identify what the barriers are and help them break them down.”

There is no one diet that suits everybody, she says.

“Any diet that revolves around real fresh healthy foods is great. It’s when they start restricting and say I can’t have this and I can’t have this, that’s not life. They fall off the wagon and give up. I’m about finding what works for people and their body so I don’t advocate one particular diet. It has to be something that has to be sustainable or it won’t work.”

Yandle has changed her eating habits as well and in the past year has started eating meat again.

“I am no longer a vegetarian, but for 27 years it worked for me. I realised you could still love animals and eat meat, it’s more about how they are raised. So, now I’m a little bit closer to what my ancestors would have eaten in sense of eating meat.”

But it is the idea of connecting with each other, of slowing down, of shopping at farmers markets and eating real food as often as possible, she says.

“That’s how I’ve connected to how my ancestors would have eaten.”

 – Stuff