Happy Anniversary to Martha Tatarnic – it’s been two years since the publication of her book the living diet: A Christian Journey to Joyful Eating. Take it from me – a self-proclaimed non-religious, not very spiritual individual – it’s an interesting read! In honour of this anniversary – I’m re-posting this particular blog – an interview with the author followed by links to buy a copy of the book and/or to get in touch with Martha. Enjoy, everybody!
I first met Martha Tatarnic in a very unlikely place. A very unlikely place for me – not for her. It was in church. Most people who know me, know that I have complicated feelings toward organized religion – for a variety of reasons that I will not go into at this time. So about 15 years ago, when my husband broached the subject of baptizing our first born child, it was with great trepidation that I agreed. No sooner had I acquiesced, he then informed me we were required to sit in on a few classes at the church designed to prepare families for the upcoming commitment surrounding baptism.
Martha Tatarnic was the priest heading up these group sessions. She happened to be young, vibrant, friendly and welcoming. Much to my surprise, during these sessions I actually felt comfortable enough to share my apprehension for my daughter’s upcoming baptism. My initial concerns, now brought to light during this session, turned into a long and interesting conversation that helped me make several realizations about my own internalized hesitations and problematic feelings.
And this was in large part due to Martha.
Martha’s first book – the living diet: A Christian Journey to Joyful Eating – was published in spring. It explores the relationship between food and our bodies with a perspective quite different from the normal language around diet and health we hear so often.
Reading Martha’s book felt very much like partaking in a conversation with her. Within its pages, she offers up non-judgemental insight and guidance in an enjoyable and thought-provoking manner. While reading it, I uncovered many personal realizations – things I had either never consciously considered before or just wasn’t capable of connecting the dots on.
I was compelled by Martha’s astute observations connecting food and our day-to-day lives. The way it feeds (pun intended) into our celebrations, our relationships, the way we view ourselves.
Currently, Martha is the lead priest of a thriving downtown Anglican church – St. George’s – which resides in St. Catharines Ontario. She also writes a regular blog for the Anglican Church of Canada, which can be found at medium.com.
After reading the living diet, it was my great pleasure to connect with Martha in order to find out more about the book, her ideas within, as well as her writing process. Our exchange is recounted below.
T.K. Please provide us with a quick overview of the living diet.
M.T. I had an eating disorder when I was younger. Part of my healing from that disorder has been the recognition that, although this had been a lifelong source of guilt and shame for me, it wasn’t exactly my fault that I fell into these behaviours. When I was at my sickest and most obsessed, I was coddled and encouraged in that sickness and obsession by every message I received around me about food, weight, weight loss, waistlines, health and wellness. We are taught to be at war with our bodies. We are given non-stop and ever-changing advice about how to drop pounds and be healthy. We are bombarded with junk food temptations, diet food solutions, and all of the guilt and dissatisfaction of living in bodies that never quite measure up.
At every step of the way, I am taught that the food I eat is only about me. But eating is biologically an act of relationship. When we eat, we are taking food (plants, animals, soil, water, air, human toil) from outside of ourselves in order that we ourselves can live. The Christian faith builds spiritually on this biological reality: food is a sign of God’s loving presence, the banquet is an image for the kingdom of God, and eating becomes a means of building community and growing in our relationship with God.
My book draws on stories—some of them mine, many from the Christian tradition—to recalibrate our relationship with food. When we make choices around food and eating with a mind toward the building and strengthening of relationship, then we break out of our obsessive and disordered patterns, claiming not only the gift and joy of eating, but also a truer vision of what it means to be healthy and well.
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T.K. What is the significance behind the book’s title? How did you come to choose it or decide on it?
M.T. The word diet actually means “a way of life” or “a manner of living“. I wanted to reclaim that word away from what it has come to mean: our collective obsessing about weight loss and a very narrow understanding of health and wellness. Instead, I use it to mean practices, attitudes and perspectives around food that contribute to the building and strengthening of relationships and communities. When we understand our own health and eating habits as being inextricably connected to the world around us, then we have a chance to step out of the obsessing and start living.
T.K. Please describe how the living diet came together for you – specifically in terms of your initial idea, your writing process and your path toward publication.
M.T. I started writing the living diet about eight years before it finally found its publisher. The writing process was relatively easy. Although I had two young children and a full-time job, the energy for writing came easily because I knew this was a story I needed to share. That being said, the book ended up needing a lot of time to develop. I had a number of readers over the years help me to edit, revise and develop. My own relationship with food and my body went through changes, developments and ongoing healing through that time too, so the ideas that ended up being published had different components than some of the earlier drafts—and for that, I’m grateful. Most importantly, although the writing process itself was energizing, I really had to “dig deep” in order to stick with the frustrating path of trying to find a publisher, particularly learning how one might navigate entry into the fortress that is the publishing world. Because the publishing industry has changed so much in the age of the internet, the options for an unknown Canadian Christian author were limited or non-existent. It took not only time, but most importantly the building of relationships with other Christian authors and the seeking out of mentors in that field, to finally make the right connection between my book and its publisher.
T.K. Has the writing and publication of the living diet changed your life? If yes – how so?
M.T. In some ways, I feel like a person in a new job. As I accept various invitations across North America to speak on this book—which involves sharing some of my more vulnerable stories—I am constantly being thrown out of my comfort zone and into unknown audiences who have a variety of reactions to my book. It takes time to develop the skill set for this kind of public speaking, which is very different from the sermons that I offer regularly in my own church community. That being said, of course it is exciting, and even somewhat liberating, to finally be able to discuss with others the ideas that have been simmering away in my own brain for all of these years.
T.K. During the writing and publication processes behind the culmination of your final version of the living diet, what did you learn about yourself (as a writer, mother, wife, priest, daughter etc.)?
M.T. I am a person who likes to be seen as having my life together. What I have had to learn most of all is that I am a work in process, and this is okay. I wasn’t able to write a book that was some complete work of genius, ready-made for publication. I had to learn to be a better writer. I had to take critique. I had to have my work rejected and learn that this didn’t mean that I was rejected. I had to have that work rejected again and again. I had to assess after each rejection whether there was still something I had written that I believed I needed to share. Now I have had to learn how to share parts of my story that aren’t pretty and put-together and to believe that this part of my story might actually have value. I am learning, and this is tricky, how to surrender: I don’t get to decide how my story and my book will be received; I can’t control the impact that it will or won’t have on the people who read this. I have to trust that people will receive from this book what they need to receive.
T.K. Regarding the publication process of the living diet, did anything surprise you or intimidate you? What did you learn? Is there anything you would do differently next time?
M.T. Short of being J.K. Rowling or Taylor Swift, people who work in creative fields today are expected to be active participants in their own marketing. It is one thing to write a book. It is quite another thing to promote it. I have had to learn a lot about how to access networks of communication for sharing my work with others. I am so grateful to my writer and musician friends who have had so many great suggestions about how to do that and have been so willing to encourage and share. I wonder whether this is even harder to do as a woman, whether maybe we even more deeply absorb the message that our voice isn’t to be too loud. My good friend Allison Lynn, a touring and recording musician, has to occasionally give me a pep talk about why it is not just okay, but important, to do this so that my work, created with devotion and faith and inspiration and care, gets its best chance to reach others.
T.K. As a mother of two as well as a priest, how did you physically find/make the time to work on the living diet?
M.T. I take a “power hour” most mornings. I get up an hour before every one else in the house. I refuse to use that hour for catching up on work or making lunches. I use that hour to write. What I lose in sleep, I gain in feeling like I have reclaimed a little piece of myself.
T.K. What do you hope to achieve for yourself/for others in terms of your writing (specifically the living diet and your blog etc.)?
M.T. I am a Christian leader. Wherever I look and whatever I am doing, I see the power and presence of God on the move in our lives. Every day in my work in the church, I get to hang out with the most amazing people who are living with the greatest generosity, who are serving others, who are pouring out compassion on the world around them out of their own experiences of loss or brokenness, who express sincere gratitude for the ways in which they know themselves to be deeply blessed. I write my blog and wrote this book in order to notice and celebrate where I see my own life, and the life of others, blessed, healed, made new in our relationship with God. I write about the most ordinary things, and I try to be as honest and real about my own flaws and shortcomings as possible, in order to invite others to see God in ways that are unexpected and relatable, to allow God to speak in our lives well outside of the confines of the stereotypes of religious respectability that we might carry around.
T.K. What does the term joyful eating mean to you?
M.T. Rather than eating merely for myself – my health, my waistline, my carbs/proteins/vitamins/calories—I eat with a mind toward relationship. I eat with care for the world around me. I eat with gratitude for the gift of food. I eat with others and food becomes more than just physical nourishment, it nourishes friendships and community and the bonds of family too. I eat with compassion, with my own hunger a starting point for attending to the hunger in the world around me. To reclaim the relational reality of food, to allow something other than just me and my ‘just desserts’ inform my food choices, is to reclaim a more holistic understanding of health and wellness and to live into the true joy of what our lives are for.
T.K. Emotional eating is typically something that many experts claim we should strive NOT to do. Within the living diet, you talk about how eating is an emotional activity and that we should embrace this fact. Can you explain?
M.T. From the outset of our lives, eating is not just about physical nourishment, it is also about love. Babies bond with their parents and caregivers primarily through the act of being fed by them. Eating is emotional. It is built into our DNA that the consumption of calories will also be tied to the need for love. Instead of running from this truth, or feeling guilty because of that instinct as adults to address difficulties and emotional needs with food, perhaps we can instead accept that relationship as a natural and appropriate response, even as we seek other ways of addressing this appetite than the destructive ones we so often choose.
T.K. Another statement within the living diet which really resonated with me was: “We are how we eat.” Can you please expand on your thoughts behind this statement?
M.T. The practices we adopt around eating say a great deal about who and what we value. A word of gratitude for our food before beginning to eat, sitting down for a homemade meal with family, turning off our cell phones at the table, enjoying a dessert from a local bakery thereby supporting a small business—these are all practices in how we eat that say something about what we think is important.
T.K. Yet another interesting concept found within the pages of the living diet that really struck a chord in me (and my own preconceived notions around how I perceive food) is that fasting and feasting are in fact NOT opposites. Can you please explain?
M.T. Feasting and fasting are both central Christian practices, and in fact, both are practices that resonate across religious traditions. Both are about reconnecting–becoming more mindful of our eating and therefore more grateful for the gift of food. In fasting, we choose to not eat something that we can eat in order that our hunger might make more room for God in our lives, in order that our hearts might be opened in compassion toward the hunger of others. In feasting, we surround our eating with the telling of stories, practices of gratitude, and the joy of relationship with others.
T.K. In a nutshell (and based on your own personal knowledge and experience), what advice would you give someone regarding healthy and enjoyable eating?
M.T. Make food choices and eating choices that build and nurture relationships: with others, with the community around you, with the created order in which you live.
T.K. Please tell us about your life and career.
M.T. I felt a call to become a priest of the church when I was around fifteen. I resisted this at the time because it wasn’t what I thought I wanted for my life. Eventually, I surrendered to the recognition that, although I could choose to do something else, I would always know that I was turning away from what I knew I was meant to do. I have been ordained now for fifteen years, serving in churches in Oakville, Orillia and now downtown St. Catharines. Aside from writing and speaking about food, I have also often been asked to speak about how the church can respond creatively and faithfully to our changing world.
T.K. When and how did you first realize that writing was something you were good at and enjoyed doing?
M.T. I am a reader first. Few things (other than food and music) give me as much joy as reading. As a child, when I couldn’t be reading a book, I would be making up my own stories to entertain myself. In university, I learned the craft of essay-writing, pulling together research, extrapolating my own ideas from the work of others and presenting a compelling argument. In the first few years of the church, a man named Chris Grabiec invited me to write regularly for our church newspaper. I started to realize that I had an ability to describe the presence and activity of God through seemingly ordinary and everyday experiences and that there was a significant audience for that.
T.K. Before the writing and publication of the living diet, what sorts of writing experience did you have?
M.T. I wrote for our church newspaper when I lived in Oakville. When I moved to Orillia, I connected with a community paper and wrote a column for them. When I moved to St. Catharines, I was invited to blog for the national church. Each of these opportunities gave me the discipline of regularly putting my ideas into words and then getting to see how those ideas resonate with an audience.
T.K. As a writer, what inspires you most?
M.T. Inspiration comes randomly and is impossible to control. When I feel the stirring of an idea, it needles at me until I carve out the time to write it out.
T.K. Do you currently have any other book or writing project in the works? And if so, can you share something about it with us?
M.T. It was very scary to put this book out into the world. I had hardly shared with anyone that I had struggled with an eating disorder, and now I’m sharing this with everyone. But one of the most amazing things about sharing this has been the willingness of others to share their stories in return. I have a few other book projects in mind (and one already begun), but I think that what will be most important in the coming years will be to follow up the living diet with ongoing reflection on our relationship with food and our bodies, based on the conversations I now have the privilege of having with so many others.
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Click here to order your copy of the living diet.
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Martha loves talking religion and politics with friends, eating (and sometimes baking) cake, running half marathons, and playing bridge and the French Horn. She is always on the look-out for new music, new challenges, and hearing new connections in an ancient word. The greatest blessing of her life is to parent two wise and creative children with her husband Dan. She has served as priest and pastor with congregations of varying shapes and sizes across Ontario, each teaching her something of why Jesus chose to use food in order to build community and reveal the love of God.
Details on writing, speaking engagements and her author’s journey can be found on her website: marthatatarnic.ca.
Feel free to check out her blog at: medium.com/@mtatarnic
Or connect with her on Facebook