Episode 210: Chris chats with Karen Ricks - Founder of Our Kitchen Classroom, Worldschooler and Montessorian. They cover playful movement, HAES, Body positivity, Karen's healing journey around food and the beauty of learning about life, geography and culture through food play. They also discuss Worldschooling and the intrinsic curiosity of children and how they can be great teachers of how to be in the world.
Karen is a Christian wife, a Worldschooling mom, and a nomadic chef. Teaching for 24 years, she’s been Montessorian since her own preschool days. She holds Montessori teacher certifications for guiding children from infancy through elementary. She has cooked professionally in restaurants, commercial kitchens, and private homes on four different continents over the last decade.
After 10 years of teaching in central Japan, where Karen founded and operated her own international Montessori school, she sold it all to begin a nomadic life of full-time travel with her family. Karen spreads her message of embracing a slow food lifestyle, a lifelong love of learning and education for peace by teaching people of all ages how to cook for themselves, and why they need to share that gift with those they love.
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 210 of Real Health Radio. You can find the show notes and the links talked about as part of this episode at seven-health.com/210.
At the beginning of September, we’re going to be starting with new clients again. This will be the last time that we start with clients in 2020. Client work is the core of the business and is the thing I actually enjoy the most. After working with clients for the last decade, I feel confident in saying I’m very good at what I do.
When I reflect on the clients that have sought out Seven Health over the last couple years, there’s a handful of areas that come up most. One of the biggest is helping women get their periods back, so recovery from hypothalamic amenorrhea, or HA. This is often a result of under-eating and over-exercising and is almost always connected with a fear of weight gain and a focus on being ‘healthy’. I’ve had clients regain their period after being absent for 10 or even 20 years, often after being told it would never happen again, or clients becoming pregnant who had almost given up hope of it happening.
We work with clients along the disordered eating and eating disorder spectrum. Many clients wouldn’t think to use the term ‘disordered eating’ to describe themselves; they just know that things aren’t right. With these clients, there are symptoms that are commonly occurring – water retention, poor digestion, always cold, peeing all the time (especially waking multiple times in the night), no periods or bad PMS, low energy, poor sleep, low thyroid. There’s also common mental and emotional symptoms – a compulsion for exercise, a fear of certain foods, anxiety, low mood or depression, poor body image, and a fear of gaining weight.
At Seven Health, we believe in full recovery. We’ve had many clients who’ve had multiple stays at inpatient facilities where nothing worked, but through working with us, they got to a place of full recovery.
Many clients come to Seven Health because they want help transitioning out of dieting and so they can finally start to listen to their body. They’ve had years or decades of dieting, and it hasn’t worked, but they’re struggling to figure out how to eat without dieting. Many clients experience feelings of body shame and hatred. They’re determined to be a particular size, and they feel frustrated or even angry by what they see in the mirror. They want to get past this and to be able to be present and stop putting life on hold.
In all these scenarios, we use the core components of what Seven Health is about, which is science and compassion. We focus on both physiology and psychology, so understanding how the body works and how to best support it and also understanding the mental/emotional side and uncovering someone’s identity and values and priorities and traits and beliefs, and looking at how these are helping or hindering with the change process.
It’s these kind of clients that make up the bulk of the practice, and I’m very good at helping people get to places with their food and their body, and even with their life, that feel out of reach.
If any of these scenarios sound like you and you’d like help, then please get in contact. You can head over to seven-health.com/help, and there you can read about how we work with clients and apply for a free initial chat. This will be the last time we start with clients in 2020, so if you would like help, then please reach out. The link, again, is seven-health.com/help, and I’ll also include it in the show notes.
Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. On today’s show, I have a guest interview, and my guest is Karen Ricks. Karen is a Christian wife, a Worldschooling mom, and a nomadic chef. Teaching for 24 years, she’s been Montessorian since her own preschool days. She holds Montessori teacher certifications for guiding children from infancy through elementary. She has cooked professionally in restaurants, commercial kitchens, and private homes on four different continents over the last decade.
After 10 years of teaching in central Japan, where Karen founded and operated her own international Montessori school, she sold it all to begin a nomadic life of full-time travel with her family. Karen spreads her message of embracing a slow food lifestyle, a lifelong love of learning and education for peace by teaching people of all ages how to cook for themselves, and why they need to share that gift with those they love.
You can learn more about her, her family’s edible exploits, and the lessons they’re learning on their Worldschooling adventures as they gallivant around the globe over at www.ourkitchenclassroom.com.
I was introduced to Karen through Meret Boxler, who is the host of Life. Unrestricted. If you’ve come across that podcast, that is Meret. Meret is a client of mine, and Karen was an avid listener of Meret’s podcast. She actually credits it with being one of the biggest helpers in healing her relationship with food and body. Since then, Meret and Karen have become friends, and it was Meret who then put me on to Karen’s work, and I’m so glad that she did.
As I covered in Karen’s bio, she has a life that looks very different to most – traveling the world and living a nomadic existence with her partner and her child. Why I wanted to have Karen on the show and to have this conversation was really to demonstrate what is possible when food and body and body image issues are no longer taking up space in your head. This doesn’t mean that you will necessarily travel the world as she does, but the way she talks about food and movement and the freedom and joy that she has in this area, her curiosity for life and making connections with other people in each of the new communities that she enters into – there’s so many positives that can be taken from this, even if your life experience is very different to Karen’s.
As part of this conversation, we chat about her upbringing and how food and diet featured as part of this; her moving from the U.S. to Japan and subsequently opening a Montessori school and also teaching ice skating; her going through the journey with healing her relationship with food and exercise and what this looked like and the things that helped and made it possible. We chat about the homeschooling or the Worldschooling that she does with her son, and how kids can be great teachers of how to be in the world, and the fascination and natural curiosity that they have, as well as touching on some of the places Karen has lived in – Italy and Albania.
There’s a lot that we cover, and Karen really does have a beautiful story. Let’s get on with the show. Here is my conversation with Karen Ricks.
Hey, Karen. Thank you for joining me on the show today.
Karen Ricks: Thank you so much for having me, Chris. I’m really excited to be here.
Chris Sandel: You are someone who has such an interesting story. When I started to put together the questions for today, I realised there’s so many aspects of your life that I want to chat about. You cook, you travel the world, you homeschool. Many, or maybe even most, of the listeners are going to have a life experience that is different to yours, but I feel there’s many lessons or ideas that can be taken from what you’re doing and applied to other areas of life. So I’m really excited about today’s conversation and what we’ll get to cover.
00:07:48
I want to start with you as a kid. What was food like in your household growing?
Karen Ricks: I grew up in southern California, which I didn’t realise until after I moved away, going to school in New York, that there was an incredible abundance of things like fresh produce available all year round. It was a really amazing thing for me to discover as an adult – like I said, the incredible abundance that was available in my childhood that I didn’t realise was not the reality for everyone everywhere.
But also, backing up against that abundance was the scarcity of food and security. There were periods where my mother was raising me as a single parent, along with as many as five siblings at a time in the household. So there were a lot of us in the house, and sometimes there was plenty of food and sometimes there was not so much. Having an abundance of fresh, seasonal food was always cause for celebration.
Chris Sandel: What would be the driver behind there being the abundance or the scarcity? Was it to do with job insecurity, or was it to do with cultural events or like Christmastime? What was the driver with that stuff?
Karen Ricks: There was definitely an abundance around holidays and special savings for those things, but as a single parent, my mom often struggled to provide for all of us – not because of job insecurity, but as a teacher, she was employed during the school year, and then when it was not the school year, things were different too.
Also, as I said, there were some times when all of our siblings were together in the household and then some times where they were not. My parents divorced when I was about six years old, and then my mom remarried a few years later. So we had a blended family with more people in the household, so there was a fluctuation of both income and mouths to feed. Things were constantly changing in our household, but we always tried our best to take care of one another, and being able to provide great meals on the table, whether we had a lot or a little bit, was a really empowering thing for me to take on as a child.
Chris Sandel: And that was mostly driven by your mom? Was she really into cooking or spending time in the kitchen?
Karen Ricks: I wouldn’t say my mom was really excited about cooking. She did what she could when she needed to. But my mom has always had an appreciation for good food, too. So when I expressed a desire to learn how to cook, she wasn’t the type of person who was like “Oh, yes, great. Here, let me show you,” but she knew how driven I was personally, and she said, “You know where the cookbooks are. You know how to read and follow directions. Go to town.” [laughs] I was really appreciative of having the freedom to be able to do that.
Again, it wasn’t until I was an adult as a teacher and I began working with other parents who were not as willing to give their children free rein in the kitchen that I realised what a gift that was that my mother had given me. So that is a huge driver behind the work that I do today as a cook, as a teacher – not just for young children who have that same desire to explore in the kitchen like I did, but for parents, giving them the opportunity to see how much educational value it has as well as how much self-confidence and independence it really inspires in their young children.
So helping parents learn to let go and encourage children in the same way that my mother encouraged me is a huge driver for me.
Chris Sandel: What age was this starting for you, this pull or desire to be cooking? Can you remember when that started?
Karen Ricks: Six years old.
Chris Sandel: And from that moment forward, your mom was okay with you cooking? Or was it “I was into it at six years old, but it wasn’t until I was eight or nine,” or at some point later that she gave you the freedom to be able to do stuff in the kitchen?
Karen Ricks: Oh, she gave me the green light from Day 1 and I haven’t looked back since. I’ve been cooking freely and frequently ever since
Chris Sandel: Nice. I know you have your own son; at what age did you start cooking with him in the kitchen?
Karen Ricks: My son has not known anything else his entire life. He was literally probably just a couple of months old and sitting on my hip in a sling, a baby carrier, and reaching out to grab a wooden spoon to help me stir. [laughs] He has literally never known anything else but being able to help in the kitchen.
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Chris Sandel: It’s interesting; I’ve got a two-and-a-half year old, and I love and struggle with him being involved in the kitchen. It’s this thing of like I know how important food is, I know how much more he’ll enjoy things if he’s involved, I know how much he’ll learn from participating and getting to do things with me, so there is this willingness where I’m like “I can see all the benefits here.” But in practice it’s probably one of the most stressful things that I ever do when I try and cook something with him. Trying to make bread with him or even pancakes with him can be quite stressful.
Let’s treat this as a therapy session. What advice would you have for me in that realm?
Karen Ricks: The first thing I always talk with parents about is exactly what you acknowledged: the fact that we recognise as adults that it takes time, it takes practice, it takes exposure, and the growing and developing coordination to have the sorts of skills in the kitchen that give us that independence as adults.
We recognise that, just like at age two or age five or even 10 or 15, our children have these growth and development needs. They’re not going to be able to do everything perfectly from the beginning, but in the same way that we don’t limit the types of foods that we want them to try or the different places that we want them to be able to explore, we also don’t want to limit their ability to have this exposure in the kitchen because we recognise that as they learn, as they grow, as they have this practice, their skills will continue to grow and develop.
As soon as you recognise that it’s important, then you can start to tackle what you addressed, which was that personal stress that you have. And why, as adults, does it cause us stress or this fear or anxiety of working with children in the kitchen? As I said, from my personal experience, there’s anxiety about the food possibly being wasted. When there’s not a lot of food to go around, we want to make sure that we’re very careful with what we have. I encourage parents with very simple recipes where they know the children can’t really mess it up, that everything’s going to be just fine, is one way to help reduce those stressors.
And then there’s basic kitchen safety, whether it’s working around sharp objects like knives or other cutting implements or heat coming from the stove or the oven. All of these things too can be broken down into individual skillsets. We don’t have to immediately throw children into the kitchen where there’s hot sputtering oil because we’re deep frying something. We’re not asking two-year-olds to take a heavy roast out of the oven all by themselves. [laughs]
Obviously there are different age appropriate levels at which children can participate, can be included, and can really begin to take ownership of even some small part of the meal preparation. As you know, when they do that, they really have a stake in the finished product, and that is so encouraging for young children, to be able to have their hands in the process from the very beginning and to enjoy everything that they have a chance to make.
Chris Sandel: When I think of where my stress comes from, it’s the same place that it comes from with pretty much every stress I have with a young child, which is just time. If you have all the time in the world, then it is completely okay. If it takes you 45 minutes to get dressed, it takes you 45 minutes to get dressed.
But it’s always when you’re trying to get something cooked in a specific amount of time or you know how long it takes you to do it as a solitary individual and then you’re trying to do that with something else – that’s normally where, at least for me, I butt up against it. I’m like, “This is now taking longer than I intended” or “There is now going to be a lot more cleanup than would usually happen.” So I think that’s part of the bit that I need to get around – just doing it more when there is more time available or me being relaxed about things taking longer than they otherwise would.
Karen Ricks: That is one of the things that I think has been so incredibly enlightening now in 2020, with the global pandemic and so many more people spending so much more time at home: that issue of time has suddenly shifted for so many families. So many parents recognising that we’re not out taking the kids to soccer practice or to this activity or even to school and back, so we have more time to spend together as a family. How can we best utilise that time? What things have we been putting off because we didn’t have time that we can now really slow down and enjoy together?
It’s been really exciting for me to see more and more families getting together and spending that time in the kitchen, preparing meals together.
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Chris Sandel: Just going back to your childhood and maybe to adolescence, are you someone who has a history of dieting?
Karen Ricks: I did. In fact, as young as probably eight years old, I remember receiving this book that was supposed to be all about health and confidence for young women headed into adulthood. I look back at some of the things that were in there, and I wouldn’t even want to repeat them for fear of creating the same sort of horrible trauma that I experienced prior to adolescence.
Basically lots of messages telling me that my body was a problem. It was a very damaging thing that I know was given to me with the best of intentions in order to try to have me be a healthy young woman, but it sent some very unhealthy messages at way too young an age. I spent decades of my life internalising those messages that my body was a problem because it was too large, it was too round, it was too heavy. It was always too much.
I am thankful to be in a place in my life now where I no longer spend a lot of time and effort and energy trying to shrink myself in any way because I wouldn’t be free to do the work that I do today if my head was still mired in all of that diet culture nonsense.
Chris Sandel: When you were given that book, was that a message that was then given to everyone in your household? Or it was like “This is a special message for you because of your body”?
Karen Ricks: Oh, no, it wasn’t necessarily directed specifically at me, but that was one of the first things that I remember receiving. As I look back on my childhood through the lens of diet culture, I realise that it was all around me. My mom was constantly trying all sorts of fad diets, and I remember tasting different things that came through the household – most of which were just terrible – thinking “Ugh, this is what I have to look forward to? That’s just miserable.”
But it was really just what I was being groomed to expect because that was just the way things were. “Women are supposed to be shrinking themselves.”
There were a lot of different messages, too, honestly. As a black woman, I was told a lot of things too about my skin colour being too dark or my hair being too curly or my lips and my nose and my hips being too wide. All these different messages, and all of it was from the same multiple sources as just a constant stream of “that’s just the way things are, so you have to get used to that.”
It really wasn’t until I was able to remove myself from that I had the opportunity to gain some clarity of a completely different perspective.
Chris Sandel: When you say remove yourself from that, you mean by going traveling and being in different places in the world? Or in some other way?
Karen Ricks: I would say some of it started initially when I left home to go to school at 18, but yes, even more so back in 2007 when my husband and I left the United States and moved to Japan. Things like being stared at for being in a larger body no longer seemed to be such a drastic problem because I was simply larger than everyone else around me. But that was just the way that I was made, and just like I wasn’t expected to look Japanese as a Black American woman, there was no amount of work that I could do that would make myself fit into that mould.
It really started to open my mind to the fact that maybe all this time that I had been trying to shrink myself into being a smaller person overall – what’s the point? It’s not going to happen.
Chris Sandel: Did you have periods of being smaller and being bigger and being on diets and off diets, and that was just an ongoing thing that really did run on for decades?
Karen Ricks: It absolutely did, yes. I had lots of periods – I’ve always been a very physically active person and I’ve always enjoyed food, but I’ve had varying periods of physical activity and varying periods of binging and restricting in an effort to try to change the shape and size of my body.
Things that I was praised for were periods in my life when I was absolutely miserable, and things that I was chastised for, I realise looking back, were periods where I was actually embracing what I really wanted to do. As I said, separating myself by moving to a different country, stepping out of the culture in which it seemed like maybe there was some possible way that I could achieve this far-off goal – it really gave me the opportunity to start to let go of this idea that I was ever going to achieve this ‘pie in the sky’ ideal.
What was most helpful was not just the letting go, but having something else positive to redirect my energy and my effort, and that was the teaching that I was doing.
Chris Sandel: I want to speak about the teaching, but just in terms of the dieting and the stated love of cooking that’s been there since you were a six-year-old, how was it for you holding those two things together? Because it would seem that in some ways, they may’ve been at odds with one another.
Karen Ricks: Absolutely, they were at odds with one another. It felt like a constant internal tug-of-war. “I want to be able to enjoy this great food, but I’m also being pulled to this idea that I can’t have that or I can’t have too much of that or I can’t have it too often.” So yeah, it was a constant struggle.
00:27:28
Chris Sandel: You mentioned the teaching side. When you finished school, did you know you were going to get into teaching? Or what did your schooling and then your studies after that look like?
Karen Ricks: Oh, I’ve always been a teacher. As the oldest child in the household, I taught my younger siblings. My very, very first paying job was before I was even a teacher, and I was teaching piano lessons to the other girls in my Girl Scout troop. I come from a family of teachers, even, too. My mother is a lifelong teacher, and other family members as well.
So I feel like I was born into it, and it just took a little while for me to embrace teaching as the profession that I would eventually enjoy in a classroom setting for a while, and in the teaching of food and cooking that I do now. But I’ve always been a teacher, and I am a teacher at heart.
Chris Sandel: Before you moved away to Japan, were you teaching back in the U.S.? Is that what your job was?
Karen Ricks: Yes.
Chris Sandel: And you were teaching Montessori as well?
Karen Ricks: That’s right.
Chris Sandel: For anyone who’s unfamiliar with that term or has heard that term but doesn’t really know what it means, are you able to explain what Montessori is?
Karen Ricks: Sure. It is a method of didactic education. Lots of people like to think of it as really hands-on, in which especially young children – Montessori is most known for the education of young children – are able to interact freely, choosing their work from the various learning materials that are available to them in their educational environment.
Montessori children select their work freely, work with a variety of specially designed didactic materials with a hands-on method, including things that might be heavy and metal and wood and glass, from even the youngest ages, from infancy and toddlers. They have the guidance of Montessori-trained adults to help direct that learning process.
Chris Sandel: Is that the education that you’d had? Is that why you were pulled in that direction, or there was some other reason that you got into it?
Karen Ricks: Yes, I went to a Montessori school as a child from preschool, and that was really the foundation from which I began my formal education. I later went through public schools, and when I was drawn back into teaching in the classroom, it was a Montessori school in my neighbourhood where I was first able to volunteer. Being back in that familiar early childhood education setting and watching the children exploring the learning materials freely, I felt right at home again.
So I went on to continue Montessori studies and work with young children. The Montessori primary classrooms are mixed age, between the ages of three and six, and elementary school classrooms are also mixed age, between six and nine and nine to twelve.
Shortly after my son was born, I even studied Montessori guidance for infants and toddlers as well. I had been working with the director of the school in the United States to expand their program to include infants and toddlers before my husband and I moved to Japan, and I never expected that the Montessori school that I would end up opening for myself would be outside of the United States, but it ended up being one of the most incredible experiences of my life.
00:31:49
Chris Sandel: Let’s talk about that in terms of your move to Japan. Before moving to Japan, where were you living in the U.S.?
Karen Ricks: My husband and I were living in South Carolina when he was recruited to teach English for the largest Japanese English language school in the entire country.
I worked with the director of my school, and we had made arrangements for me to train my replacement in the elementary classroom where I was teaching, and I was just going to be gone for a year. My husband and I had plans to leave and then we were going to come back. We just enjoyed ourselves so much, we ended up staying in Japan for 10 years.
Chris Sandel: Wow. Had you done much traveling as a child or as a teenager, even in your early twenties? Was that something that was really common and that was a big hobby of yours? Or somehow you just moved to Japan and that was one of the first things you’d done?
Karen Ricks: It wasn’t the first time that I’d traveled. Growing up in southern California, I used to cross the Mexican border on a regular basis. This is back in the days when you didn’t need a passport to do so. So international travel had always been a part of my life.
I always had an incredible wanderlust. My husband and I travelled around the United States, and we went on a big trip around Europe for our honeymoon. But moving to Japan was definitely way outside my comfort zone. In fact, it took my husband years to convince me that that was really something that I would be able to do. So I thank him for that on a regular basis because, as I said, we had left intending for it to be just one year, and we were planning to return to the United States, but that was 13 years ago. We’ve been back to visit a few times, but we haven’t had a permanent address in the United States for the last 13 years.
Chris Sandel: You said moving to Japan was out of your comfort zone. What aspects of it before you moved felt like they were going to be the most challenging for you?
Karen Ricks: Oh, absolutely everything. The very idea of it was overwhelming at first because we weren’t talking about picking up and going as tourists. In fact, when I finally first thought I was coming around to the idea and I told my husband, “Well, I guess I could get used to living in Tokyo,” he replied that he wanted to live anywhere but the capital city because he didn’t want to be in a place where we could literally put ourselves in an English bubble.
But at the time that we were discussing this, we didn’t speak any Japanese. We didn’t read or write or understand any Japanese. We didn’t know anybody who lived in Japan. In fact, we didn’t know anybody who had ever done anything like what we were contemplating. So every single aspect of what we were about to undertake was brand new to us.
Chris Sandel: Are you someone who considers yourself an introvert, an extrovert?
Karen Ricks: I would say I’m extroverted.
Chris Sandel: Okay. And your husband?
Karen Ricks: My husband is much more introverted.
Chris Sandel: Especially now that you’ve moved so many times, the fact that you’re extroverted, do you think that helps with that process in terms of meeting new people and becoming part of the community?
Karen Ricks: Without a doubt. It is absolutely a huge beneficial aspect to our travels. The longer we do this, the more comfortable it is for all of us – me, my husband, and our son as well.
00:36:09
Chris Sandel: What did the first couple of years look like in Japan?
Karen Ricks: The interesting thing about my move was that there was more stress at the beginning because, as I mentioned, I was staying behind in the United States to train my replacement. My husband actually moved to Japan before I did, and the company that had recruited him went bankrupt just before I was getting ready to leave to join him.
So not only had my husband gone to teach with this specific company, but then he lost his job, he found a new job and moved to a new city. My plans to join him changed drastically at the last minute. I was expecting to move to one city and went to a completely different city. So there was a little extra bump of anxiety before everything happened.
But when I arrived in Japan to join my husband, he was already getting settled with a new company, teaching with a different English language school – a much smaller school in a smaller city – and we were fortunate to have the help of the Japanese staff there to help us get settled.
I was just really being a tourist and exploring the city while my husband was out teaching. I never had any plans to teach in Japan. I made friends in our local community, and I took local classes in yoga and calligraphy and explored the local parks and studied the Japanese language. It was just fascinating. I felt like a person who had been dropped on another planet. [laughs] Because literally everything about day to day life was different from my upbringing.
Chris Sandel: Did you have a background in languages where Japanese wasn’t the first other language outside of English that you were learning?
Karen Ricks: While I didn’t have a background in Japanese, I had studied Spanish in school, and bouncing back and forth across the Mexican border from southern California, I was comfortable in Spanish. I feel like that was very helpful in taking on a new language, but learning Japanese with three different syllabary – only two of which are phonetic, like alphabets – was really a daunting task.
So diving into Japanese language lessons was a huge part of day to day life and the regular study in order to be able to not just communicate with people, but to learn how to read and write all over again was an enormous challenge.
Chris Sandel: How long did it take before you felt comfortable in say conversational Japanese?
Karen Ricks: Oh goodness. [laughs] I would say that even today, while I don’t feel like I have problems getting around in Japanese, it really depends on the topic of conversation.
Maybe within a month or so, I had gained enough confidence to be able to shop at my local market and ask for specific things, but as much as I knew how to ask a question of “Where is this?” or “What is this?”, for example, the fact that I don’t have much of an accent when I speak in Japanese would lead people to assume that my fluency level was much higher than it really was. So the answers that I would get were frequently well above my level of comprehension. [laughs]
So there was always this aspect of maybe a little trepidation in understanding when I would attempt to engage in conversation. But that’s part of the excitement and the adventure of living in a new place too.
Chris Sandel: Do you think, again, your extroversion helped with that over your husband, or not?
Karen Ricks: Absolutely, it did. In fact, he will acknowledge clearly that my desire to get out and communicate with other people on a regular basis was one of the things that helped make him more comfortable not just in the process of staying, but again, as we have continued to move from one country to the next, it’s something that I might not necessarily be comfortable with, but I can gain in skill relatively quickly. Enough that survival language skills are yet another tool in our travel bags.
Chris Sandel: When you’re moving to these different locations – which we will get into in more detail in a moment – are you very conscious of wanting to then be part of the community or really getting to know people in the local area as opposed to just you guys staying as a family unit and moving to a new location because it’s pretty or it’s got good weather?
Karen Ricks: We’re absolutely committed to becoming involved in the community when we move to a new location. It’s a huge aspect that helps to determine where we’re going to live and what sorts of activities we might get involved with, how we get to know our neighbours or other people in the community.
There’s such a richer, deeper level of cultural and linguistic immersion as we get to know our neighbours and make friends everywhere we live that it really makes for an entirely different lived experience than traveling as a tourist and just being on vacation somewhere.
00:49:08
Chris Sandel: Yeah, and with the third option you mentioned there in terms of providers who really haven’t been successful in doing the work on themselves and want to be able to get through that. I know you run a group with Aaron Flores about providers who have then relapsed or are struggling with their own eating disorder. Do you want to just talk a little about that?
Rachel Millner: Sure, Aaron and I started this group, gosh I guess it’s been a year now and we’re now running two sections of the group because there’s been such a high need for it. We started the group out of conversations he and I were having and then hearing from some providers who trusted us and saying that I’m really struggling here, and there is so much stigma in the eating disorder field that I feel like I cant be honest, I cant get help and I’m stuck.
For both Aaron and I, who both have a really strong belief that, I think our ethics are really aligned with the belief that providers are people too, and we get to struggle, and that acting like providers don’t struggle, means that providers struggle more. And that peoples lives are in danger because they’re not able to access care and that providers can hold all of it. We can be engaged in our own personal struggle and still show up for our clients in a way thats helpful and it’s interesting, you know the eating disorder field really challenges this, this belief that, well if a provider is actually struggling then there’s no way they can be helpful to clients and they should step away form their work, not see eating disorder clients, and we never hear that with other mental health issues.
Ive never heard somebody say, well if a provider is struggling with depression, they should not see folks with depression, thats just not a conversation that happens, this only happens around eating disorders.
So when Aaron and I started this group, providers started to contact us, and it’s interesting because when providers contact us, questions they ask are, is there anybody else in my community who’s going to be in this group? Because I don’t want to see anybody I know or I’m going to have to share clients with. Because there’s so much shame and there so much stigma around it, and then when people are in the group, they’re shocked that not only are other providers struggling as much as they are, but that there’s a place to be open and vulnerable and nobody is judging them, that it’s all welcome. We really invite people to be honest and share where they are in their own eating disorder and for the providers who are in our groups, they’ve never been in a space like that before.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, it really is amazing the work you’re doing here. I had Aaron on the podcast and we had a bit of a chat about it then, and it was, yeah I definitely on this show before talked about the dangers of people with previous eating disorders getting into doing this work and doing so, where I thought it was something that needed to be talked about, but hearing you and Aaron talking about this as well, just realising that if that is the stance and that’s what people always hear, then if someone is struggling, they’re going to be secret about it, it’s going to be ongoing.
Eating disorders, as you talked about, in terms of you growing up, are shameful enough and something people will keep a secret but if this is the area that you then work in and you make your livelihood in and you see people in, there’s almost, maybe a feeling of surely you should know better and know how to do this. Of course thats going to keep people stuck and so upon reflection, I was like this is so important that this is going on and you guys are doing this work.
Rachel Millner: Thanks, yeah I think for both of us, we’ve talked about how fulfilling its been to offer this space and how honoured we both feel that providers are trusting us and contacting us, because it takes a lot of bravery to even reach out. There’s so much vulnerability in that and to say this is what’s going on for me, given the amount of stigma. I think what you’re saying is so true, providers end up struggling in secret and I really think we can trust providers to know, I don’t think any provider wants to harm their clients, and so if a provider is struggling in a way that they need to step back from their work.
I think we can support them in doing that, without telling them thats what they have to do or giving an ultimatum. Like we were talking about with clients, if it doesn’t work with clients it’s not going to be helpful for providers. So it’s not to say that providers don’t ever need to step back, but I think we can trust providers to know and to do their own work and their own therapy if we create spaces where that is possible. If providers can’t access care how are they ever going to know what they need for their own healing and how to best support their clients.
Chris Sandel: Definitely, and the difficulty is being a provider, they probably know the best people that they should be able to speak to, but then they can’t because they can’t let that person know that I’ve got this thing going on. So it’s like they have this real wealth of knowledge about, okay what would be the best thing to help me here? but they just feel like they can’t even access it.
Rachel Millner: Yes, I think that’s so true and so challenging to know what’s out there and who they would want to be talking to or what treatment centre they might want to go to but not being able to access it, for all different reasons, the stigma is just one of them, there is certainly other reasons. But yeah, so frustrating to be in that position.
Chris Sandel: And so I asked before in terms of what are the things that with supervision are coming to you and saying hey I need help in this area, but what about for you, are there things that you notice that people are doing that they’re unaware of that you’re having to point out and say hey I don’t think that this is so helpful or maybe you want to be reading a bit about this because I’m noticing this thing and that could be causing a problem.
Rachel Millner: Yeah I think it’s really important as a supervisor, or even as a therapist when I’m working with providers, to be able to give that feedback and to offer some guidance and some direction. But like I was saying earlier we do that collaboratively, we do that in relationship with one another. The care I provide is always trauma informed, so it’s not let me tell you this, it’s would it be okay if we talked about X, Y or Z? Would you be open to me offering a suggestion? How would it feel if I gave you a suggestion of a book to read? Or how would it feel if we talked about this topic? So making sure that I’m getting consent along the way, but I definitely will incorporate some suggestions or of course feedback and guidance as long as I’m getting consent first.
Chris Sandel: Nice, and are there other, specific areas that a lot of people have blind spots in, where you feel like this is the one or the two areas that I mention a lot that people just don’t necessarily think about?
Rachel Millner: I think there’s often a place where people get stuck in their process of incorporating HAES, it’s often the, okay I get this, up until the X weight, but what about the folks who are Y weight and so have mobility issues or this or that like then I’m not totally getting it. Or I understand if people are “healthy” but what if they’re getting feedback about certain illnesses and their doctors telling them they should be losing weight. At that point should we be promoting weight loss? So I think those are some of the areas that people bump up against their own weight stigma.
I remember listening to Sonya Renee Taylor from The Body is Not an Apology on a podcast and one of the things she was talking about was the point at which you start the sentence with yeah but, is the point at which you’re at your learning edge and you’re weight stigma or internalised fatphobia or racism, or whatever it is, is showing up and then you know thats the place you need to be doing your own work.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, I would say that what you described there was probably an area for me that took a while to fully grapple with and understand. So yeah I can understand how that is the case for other people as well.
Rachel Millner: Definitely.
00:43:06
Chris Sandel: Going back to Japan, when did you end up opening the Montessori school there and how did that come about?
Karen Ricks: We opened the doors to our international Montessori school in 2011. This was just 4 months after my son was born. The reason that came about, actually, was a couple years before that I had made a friend who was a Japanese mother and also a teacher who was fluent in English and who had lived in the United States for a little while. Upon returning to Japan, she wanted to be able to continue to expose not only her own children, but other young children to the English language. So she was teaching these ‘Mommy & Me’ style classes in the local community centre.
But she was looking for a partner, somebody to help her teach these classes. We were introduced to each other by a mutual friend, and we worked together for a few years. It was a lot of fun. It was a chance for me to continue to use my teaching skills.
The more we did that – we were working with moms and their toddlers before the children were of the appropriate age to go to their local public or private school as elementary students. After a couple of years, several of the mothers who were really happy with the things that their children were learning began to ask me, “My child is getting old enough to go to school, but I still want them to take English class with you. When are you going to open your own school so I can bring my children to your school?”
That was really how our international Montessori school began. It was the moms who had been coming to these community centre classes with me and were ready to take it to the next step.
Chris Sandel: Was that something that you thought “Hey, I really want to be doing this” or “This sounds like something that’s bigger than what I want in my life right now”? You said you had a son by that stage. Was this what you were really dreaming of, or were you more reluctant in getting involved?
Karen Ricks: I love teaching, and I had imagined opening my own school. I just never imagined that it was going to happen at that stage in my life or in parenthood, because my child was still an infant. He had literally just started crawling right before we opened the school. [laughs] But also, I never expected that it would happen outside of our passport country.
It was exciting. It was thrilling. It was exactly what I wanted to do. It was just a lot earlier and a completely different place than I ever expected it to be.
00:46:25
Chris Sandel: You talked earlier about your own issues around dieting and body image and then being in Japan and that helping you in a sense because you were so much of a fish out of water. But did going through all of these other experiences help as well?
I guess one of the things that can be so difficult with breaking free from dieting or disordered eating is the difficulty with uncertainty and living in the uncertainty of “I don’t know what’s going to happen. How am I going to deal with this when X, Y, or Z happens?” It sounds as though you are just perpetually in a state of that and realising, “Hey, I’m doing this and I’m able to survive, and not just survive, but I’m able to do this and really enjoy it.” Did that aspect help in terms of being able to break free?
Karen Ricks: When it comes to my relationship with food, what helped me even more than worrying about or overcoming the uncertainty was the positive redirection of not so much focusing on the food that I was making and consuming for myself, but the food that I was making and teaching and sharing with the children and the families that I was teaching to cook.
Food and cooking lessons were a huge part of my teaching, almost from the very beginning. I told you about the Japanese mom with whom I was co-teaching for these Mommy & Me classes. One of the first things that she and I did was to take a look at how she laid out her lessons and ways that we could streamline the process to make it easier not only for both of us to plan a series of lessons, but to be able to execute over a period of not just the next couple of weeks or couple of months, but planning out an entire year’s curriculum.
One of the very first things that we did was to move away from a lot of the disposable paper crafts that children are always constantly bringing home, but to actually do something that was going to be more fun and more interactive and more meaningful to the young children.
What I suggested was that rather than trying to cut out and tape paper fruits and vegetables to things to make a salad, we actually have the children go shopping with their mothers and pick out a vegetable and bring it to class. We had a whole month of studying vegetables and naming and identifying, describing these vegetables.
All of these Japanese mothers were complaining and worrying about how their children weren’t going to like it and exclaiming that “My child doesn’t eat this” or “My child won’t eat that,” and by the end of the month, everyone had brought together a variety of vegetables and chopped and torn them up, and we mixed up our own salad dressings and everybody pulled together this big, beautiful, colourful tossed salad, and every child ate everything that they put on their plates and asked for more, and every mother was absolutely amazed.
I was so incredibly excited by how they literally ate the lesson. [laughs] They were eating it up. Everybody was learning, everybody was having fun, and everybody wanted more. At that point, that was where all of my attention and energy and enthusiasm was directed. I was like, if I can give them more of this, if we can create more of that, everybody is going to have so much fun and learn so much more in the process.
Chris Sandel: So as you’re going through that, had you already reached that place of freedom? Or were you going through that experience and looking at the disconnect between how those kids were getting involved and really loving it and what you were trying to tell them to do, and then your own relationship with food?
Karen Ricks: My relationship with food was growing more – I would say I was relaxing the rules because I was embracing the childlike enthusiasm with which the children were approaching it as I was teaching and interacting with them. That was the positive redirection that my brain needed so that I could get out of my head and get rid of, like I said, the rules that I had spent so many literally decades internalising. I could start to let that go and realise that didn’t have to apply to me anymore.
Chris Sandel: Nice. You said the rules that you were internalising. How aware was your husband of all of your thoughts and behaviours around this? Was this something that you tried to keep to yourself and just do on the side, without him knowing? Or he was very privy to everything that was going on?
Karen Ricks: Oh, this is something my husband and I have shared over the years, both of us, being physically active and enjoying food and also being in larger bodies and being made aware of that and being told that that was ‘problematic’ from way too young an age, as young children. That was something that we have both discussed and been working through on our separate journeys, but also together, for the entire time that we’ve been together.
Chris Sandel: Did having your son also help, or had that already shifted by then?
Karen Ricks: Having my son shifted everything into overdrive because all of a sudden it wasn’t just about me anymore, but about this entire new human being that I’m responsible for as well. The diet culture lessons and rules that I had been working to remove from my brain suddenly took even a bigger place on the back burner because that was way, way less important than helping to provide for this brand new human being.
All of the wonderful things that I knew I wanted to instil in him from birth meant that improving my relationship with food and correcting all of the negative self-talk to make sure that that didn’t come out of my mouth and enter into his ears became a much higher priority for me as well.
Chris Sandel: Also, what I’ve found a lot with clients is when they remove the dieting or that being such a focus in their life, it can often create this void where because that has had such a big part of their life, other interests and hobbies have fallen by the wayside.
It also sounds from your experience and what you’re talking about like there were just so many things that were going on in your life and so many interests that when you were able to create space, rather than creating a void, you were instantly able to fill that up with so many things that you were really passionate about.
Karen Ricks: Absolutely. I’m passionate about so many different things, and it’s really exciting not to have to waste time and energy on all those things that didn’t mean anything, that weren’t helpful in my food journey for all of those decades. As I said, now I have so much more time and energy to spend on all the other things that I love to do.
00:55:13
Chris Sandel: When did you then make the move from Japan to the next location, and what was the next location?
Karen Ricks: We lived in Japan for a total of 10 years, and it was – goodness, sorry, I’m just getting really emotional because it was such a huge leap in the journey as well. We sold it all and we moved to Italy, and I went to cooking school.
Chris Sandel: Nice. What were you learning to cook in Italy?
Karen Ricks: Oh, everything. We were in Sicily, and we were making fresh pastas and breads and ice cream and pulling vegetables out of the ground and plucking fruit from the trees. We made and we ate absolutely everything. It was really, really exciting to have launched this new chapter of our food journey in conjunction with this exciting new physical journey from Japan to Italy.
Chris Sandel: When you moved to Italy, was the thought that you were then going to be there for an extended time, in the same way that you had been in Japan? Or was that the start of you being in location for a much shorter amount of time and that being an intentional thing?
Karen Ricks: Our move was intentionally planned for a rather brief period, just a few months, but there was the possibility of extending that stay, and when that opportunity fell through but another one opened in the UK, that was when we realised that our journey to location independence had really already begun. We had already moved successfully from Japan to Italy, and we could continue on our move from Italy to the UK. From there, we went on to Mexico. After each successive move, we realised we could keep doing this theoretically indefinitely. So that’s just become another exciting part of the adventure.
00:57:47
Chris Sandel: Are there parts that you miss about being in one location for a much more extended amount of time, where you do have a house that then becomes your own and things that you – not necessarily accumulate, but where there’s this feeling of maybe roots of being in a place?
Karen Ricks: Yes and no. There is a special sort of freedom that comes from living out of a backpack, knowing that you can pack up and be in another country on another continent within a very short period of time. But as I said, we’ve also been really intentional about making friends, getting to know our neighbours, learning the local language, and really immersing ourselves in the communities in which we live.
So there is that little pang of the heartstrings that says “Oh, I want to stay here,” but there’s also the call of adventure that says “There’s this other new place that you have yet to explore and lots more exciting people to meet and places to go and foods to experience as well.”
Chris Sandel: The thing I think about when you’re saying all this is your ability to be really flexible and deal with – not necessarily uncertainty, although that is there, but just being so open to new experiences all the time, which for a lot of people is great when they’re on holiday or for a limited amount of time, but it sounds as though that is pretty much your ongoing life. So I wonder, if I’d met you in your mid-twenties, would I have already been able to guess that this was your type of being? Or is this more of a learned skill?
Karen Ricks: Oh, I would absolutely say this is a learned skill because when I was in my twenties, I could not have even imagined the life that my family and I are leading now. I didn’t know that there was such a thing. I’d never heard of anything like that. I certainly didn’t know anyone who even dreamed of the possibility as well.
The more we practice it, the better we get. So it is definitely a collection of skills that I truly believe anyone can learn and improve if that’s something that they really want to do.
Chris Sandel: As a couple, how has that either helped or hindered things by being world travellers? What are the things it makes it easier on and what are the things it makes it more challenging with?
Karen Ricks: My husband and I actually just celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary.
Chris Sandel: Nice.
Karen Ricks: We have spent more than half of our married lives living outside of our passport country. Him being a white male and me being a Black American woman, we have both experienced what it feels like to be in the minority, which, considering the racial tensions in the United States right now, is a very traumatic experience at times. But it has also helped to strengthen our bonds as a family. So I think that world travel has definitely benefitted our relationship.
01:01:38
Chris Sandel: Nice. In terms of your son, one of the things that you do is Worldschooling. Is that the correct term?
Karen Ricks: Yes, it is.
Chris Sandel: Was that something that has come about because of your traveling in terms of more of the homeschool side of things? Or when you were in Japan, was he going to a regular school and the homeschooling has kicked off because you’re now traveling the world?
Karen Ricks: It’s interesting because I had never heard the term ‘Worldschooling’ until actually just before we left Japan and started our full-time travels. But as I reflect on what Worldschooling really means to us, I’ve been Worldschooling all my life. Worldschooling implies the sort of jet-setting lifestyle that people imagine that we have – this life of global travel and seemingly living on vacation.
But what it really is, is about being intentional about the ways in which you learn. What we do is learn from everybody we meet, from every place we go, from every experience that we have in our day to day lives, and recognising that people can be Worldschoolers even if they never leave their hometown, or they can be nomadic Worldschoolers as we are, travelling full-time and learning in a variety of different global locations.
Chris Sandel: What does a school day look like, then?
Karen Ricks: Well, as I told you when we just started this call today, the school day was waking up and deciding that we want to go swimming and being on the hunt to find a swimming pool. Which was an amazing and kind of stressful experience because the first place that we had really wanted to go wasn’t even open. And then again, there are the added challenges of coordinating transportation in a new-to-us language that we’re still mastering.
But our days are never quite the same. We might wake up one day and decide, “We don’t really feel like going anywhere or doing anything,” so a lot of the interaction that we have with other people is virtual. Or we might have a day where we decide we’re going to get up and go out and get lost in our community – go shopping, go explore and find a new shop or a new market, find something that we don’t recognise and ask about it and bring it home to cook up a brand-new-to-us meal.
Every day is different, and it’s really driven by those things about which we are most passionate.
Chris Sandel: What are the things that you’re most passionate about, or what are the values that you’re trying to instil as part of this way of educating?
Karen Ricks: One of the things that is really amazing, especially as an outgoing person like myself – my son is pretty outgoing too – is that upon discovering that Worldschooling was even a thing, we found ourselves in an entirely new community of Worldschoolers, hundreds of thousands of other families just like ours – not all of whom are nomadic travellers necessarily, like we are, but families who are educating their children outside of the traditional school setting, learning from a variety of different passions and interests and activities all over the world.
For example, my son loves to play video games. He can connect with other Worldschooling children on safe platforms that we have screened through the parents, and the children can connect and play these games with one another at all hours of the day and night from all over the world. [laughs]
My son also happens to be really, really physically active too. Whether it’s swimming or playing at our local trampoline park or rock climbing or doing an outdoor obstacle course, we’re always finding an amazing number of different physical activities and things where we can get out and move our bodies joyfully and just have fun exploring what it means to move and to run and jump and play.
And of course, having studied cooking and loving food, I’m really passionate about exploring the various new-to-us foods that are available in different parts of the world as we travel and getting to know more about the culinary traditions everywhere we go. Wandering around in markets, I’ve made friends with local shop owners. A trip to the market could literally be an entire week’s worth of Worldschooling lessons, learning about where something comes from, how and where it’s grown, the sorts of traditional dishes in which it’s normally prepared. There are so many myriad lessons involved in those things.
And the language lessons that are involved in connecting with the people that grow and raise our food and the cooks who teach me how to prepare these different things – it’s a wealth of information that I don’t think another even 10 years here in Albania, where we’re currently living, would allow me to master all of that before we might move on to another country or even another continent and continue our explorations.
01:08:33
Chris Sandel: Wow. It sounds like curiosity is really leading so much of what gets taught on that day. You almost have an experience and then that just leads down a rabbit hole of “This was the starting point; let’s dig into this even more and see what else we can find out about this topic.”
Karen Ricks: Absolutely. Curiosity definitely leads. It’s one of, I think, the most beneficial traits of being a lifelong learner. When you’re curious about something and when you really allow yourself to go down that rabbit hole, the learning curve – I mean, it absolutely skyrockets.
The wealth of information that surrounds us – the power of the tools that we have at our fingertips, not just on the internet, but at our fingertips here in and around our local community – there’s so much information, so many opportunities and so many new relationships to explore. It never feels like there are enough hours in the day or days in the week to be able to do it all.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. It also sounds like it’s very intrinsically motivating. It’s not that you’re having to say “Hey, I’m going to give you a gold star if you do this.” This is really fun and fascinating, and he wants to be learning because it’s probably not even thought about as learning. It’s just him exploring and having a good day.
Karen Ricks: Exactly. Absolutely. One of the things even in all my training as a Montessori guide and teacher, is it’s all about following the child. I have parents ask me all the time, “How do you motivate your child to learn this or to study that?” when I really take the completely opposite approach. It starts with my observations of my child, with the things that he tells me really light him up, what gets him excited about different things.
When we follow what he’s passionate about, what he’s curious about, what he wants to know, like I said, the learning curve just skyrockets. I can’t hold him back. I can’t provide enough information and stimulation and activities to feed that curiosity. He will devour everything.
And it’s fun not just to watch as a parent, but to participate in. I told you how physical my son is; we had the opportunity last year to see the circus here. They had this big performance at an outdoor amphitheater here in Albania. Our eyes were just alight. It was absolutely fascinating. My son was like, “I can do some of the stuff that those guys did. I’m like a contortionist.” He put his foot behind his head, and I’m like, “Oh my goodness. Wow, if that’s what you want to do, then let’s see how we go about doing that.”
Amazingly enough, we were able to connect with a gymnastics and tumbling and circus coach who was a member of the National Circus here in Albania and take tumbling and acrobatics lessons. It was just so much fun.
My son – actually, none of us – knew even a single word of Albanian before we landed in this country, but jumping in and joining this class with all these other Albanian children, he learned how to communicate and how to count, and just following what everybody else was doing and listening and learning and making friends. It’s been one of the most incredible experiences.
Chris Sandel: Wow, that’s incredible. As you were saying all that, I was reflecting on my own son. He’s two and a half, so he’s at a very different developmental stage to your son, but he is constantly looking at the clock and telling us what the time is, or constantly saying what temperature it is. Then I’ll pull out the iPhone and he’s telling me what the temperature is, what it’s going to get up to, what it’s going to drop down to, what the real feel temperature is.
So I don’t have to sit there and say, “Let’s learn numbers.” He’s showing me the ways that he wants to learn numbers as he’s trying to be able to tell us what the time is – and just realising how confusing 24-hour time is for a two-and-a-half year old. But yeah, it’s amazing to see that if you can pay attention, they will show you what they want to learn – but also to realise how much, as adults, we should be wanting to get back to that place, if we’re not in that place of curiosity.
Karen Ricks: Exactly. That’s why this food journey has been such an incredibly exciting almost rollercoaster ride for me personally as well.
01:14:08
Karen Ricks: Just before we left Japan to go to Italy, my husband introduced me to a podcast that was literally life-changing. I know you know it. It’s called Life. Unrestricted.
Here I was, on the verge – I had already begun moving away from what now feels like torturing myself, doing the sorts of exercise that I felt like I had to do, into this place of just doing what I enjoyed. I had already been moving away from food rules and restriction because I’d been teaching and working with all these young children who were just having fun playing with their food.
With this one podcast, just like with Worldschooling, I realised there was this path that I’d been on, and all this time I felt like I was by myself, and then suddenly these massive French doors were thrown open right in front of me, and I was introduced to a whole new community of other people who were on the same journey, who were following the same path, who were headed toward the same goal, which was living a life completely unrestricted. No food rules, no exercise rules; just freedom.
Meret Boxler was this calm and soothing voice, inviting me down this path to meet all these amazing people, and this was the curiosity that I followed, and I was just enthralled. It was like coming dancing into this party that I hadn’t known I really wanted to be invited to, but I was excited to meet everybody there because everybody knew something that I’d been dying to know, and I just didn’t realise I needed to know that yet.
All of a sudden, here are all these people who are giving me permission to do these things that I had been kind of tiptoeing around before. I was like, “Yeah, I’m going to do this. Yes, I can do this.” And suddenly, it was like rolling out the welcome mat. I was being told I could dance freely in this new realm that had yet to be explored. It’s been, like I said, nothing short of life-changing to be introduced to body positivity and Health at Every Size and true food freedom.
Chris Sandel: Wow, that’s amazing. I’ve had many a client who has said similar things about Meret’s podcast, and I wish it was still going because I think she’s an incredible interviewer. She had wonderful guests on, and she’s so comfortable in front of a microphone and had such amazing things to say. I’m so glad that it had such an impact on you and has helped you to get to the place that you’re at now.
Karen Ricks: It absolutely has. It may have gone away for now, but I have hopes that it might be revived in the future. [laughs]
01:17:45
Chris Sandel: I do too. You mentioned there about your exercise as well. You talked about your son being so into exercise and just loving to move his body in a joyful way. What did exercise previously look like for you? What were you doing and what was going on in that realm?
Karen Ricks: Like I said, I’ve always been a very physically active person, but there were the things that I did because I enjoyed doing them, and then there was the ways in which I exercised that felt like torture, but I only did it because I thought I had to, to try to shrink my body.
As I really began this body positivity journey, what I allowed myself to do was to turn my back on the stuff that had been torture, the things that I was forcing myself to do because I thought I had to. I really fully embraced the movement that was joyous, the things that I wanted to do because I like it, because it feels good. It’s been another part of really stepping into the fullness of who I am, accepting and embracing my role as a physically active person in a larger body.
I have to be honest; I kind of take pleasure now in shocking and surprising people with the things that I love to do because they don’t expect that a person in a larger body would do them. I mentioned the trampoline park, which my son loves. I love it too. [laughs] It’s kind of nice to go with a child in tow, but honestly, I would go without him too. Bouncing on the trampolines really feels like flying, and it’s fun.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. We recently got a trampoline here for my son, and it’s not mostly for him. [laughs] It is mostly for me. I’ve been wanting to get a trampoline for forever, and he was then the cover for why we now have a trampoline. It’s amazing.
Karen Ricks: I love that you say that. I wish as adults, more of us would be confident enough to say, “Yes, I have a child, yes, the child has – but that’s for me. I really want to do that too.” We love that. It saddens me sometimes that we got boxed into this role as adults, where we’re supposed to be more serious and responsible and whatever. We can have fun too.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. And ice skating – how does that fit into your story, and where does that fit in terms of the spectrum of joy or non-joy with exercise or movement?
Karen Ricks: Oh my goodness, I always wanted to go ice skating as a child. I mentioned I grew up in southern California; both of my parents grew up on the East Coast in the United States and moved to California, in part to get away from the cold weather. So when I begged my mom as a young child to go ice skating – she says she took me once. I don’t remember. She says I was very small, like maybe two or three years old. But she was absolutely miserable. She hated it because it was freezing cold as an adult, to sit in the stands and watch the children on the ice skating rink.
So she took us to the beach instead. And I love swimming, so that was great, but I still always wanted to skate. After I left home and I moved away to go to school, I had my own money, I was working, and I bought my own ice skates. I got a chance to finally experience what it was like to spin around in circles over and over and over again in a way that felt like it would never stop, and that for me is the essence of joyful movement.
I kept studying. I was in a place where I could skate freely and not a lot of instruction, so I was teaching myself a lot. [laughs] But I eventually moved to a place where I could hire a coach and I could study and train, and I kept going – again, just going down that rabbit hole, pursuing my passion – until I not only improved my own skills as a skater, but as a coach, till I worked up to receiving a Master rating by the Professional Skaters Association.
I love figure skating. I love teaching skating. I love getting on the ice and just spinning in circles, around and around as fast as I can go, and that dizzying feeling. It’s kind of like having your own personal rollercoaster except that you don’t have to go to a theme park and wait in line for hours to enjoy the fun. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: How many ice rinks have you found in Albania?
Karen Ricks: You know what, there is actually an ice skating rink just a few blocks from where I live.
Chris Sandel: Oh my god.
Karen Ricks: Yeah. I didn’t expect that either, but I was so thrilled to discover that it exists here, and I love it.
01:23:45
Chris Sandel: Then moving on to the food side of things, in the same way as the ice skating, was that something that you had as a hobby and a passion of your own and then did more formal training on and got coaching or assistance with?
Karen Ricks: Exactly. From the time that my mother told me to go to town with the cookbook, I’ve been studying and cooking. A lot of it initially just came from reading recipes and experimenting on my own and seeing how stuff turned out and tweaking them and trying to make it better. But the older I got, the more resources became available to me
I remember, with enthusiasm and excitement, being able to transition from seeing cooking shows on PBS, the public broadcast station in the United States, to the advent of the Food Network and then all these growing YouTube channels with professional chefs and sources like Masterclass and being able to pay for sometimes live or virtual lessons with renowned chefs from all over the world. Like so many other things that we’ve discovered in Worldschooling, there is a wealth of information and access available once you start down that rabbit hole, and it has been absolutely mind-boggling.
One of the things that I did in order to – honestly, it started out as a language study, but I made friends with a lot of housewives in Japan who also liked to cook. One of the assistant teachers in the language school where I was studying Japanese, she and I got into a long conversation about food and cooking one day, and she said, “You really need to meet my friend.”
So she introduced me to her friend, who also enjoyed cooking, and the three of us ended up coming together at least once a month for a period of – gosh, I think it was at least 8 years – and we formed this informal international cooking club. The ladies would teach me how to cook their traditional Japanese dishes, and I would teach them some of the various international dishes that I enjoyed cooking, and they would teach me in Japanese and I would teach them in English. So while we were learning cooking, we were also improving our language skills.
Chris Sandel: Wow, that is a good double learning there.
Karen Ricks: Exactly. One of the things that it reminded me of was that when we’re doing something that we enjoy, not only is that learning, meaningfully following that particular activity about which we’re passionate, but the medium of instruction is also another avenue for learning.
Yes, we were cooking, but the language learning was there too, and the interpersonal communication that was happening not just in English or in Japanese, but we often invited other people to come and join us. So we would regularly have at least half a dozen different people, and English and French and Russian and Ukrainian and Iraqi and Pakistani and Kenyan food and Filipino food and Mexican food – we traveled the globe in that kitchen, and that’s exactly what I do in my work now. I continue to draw upon all of the different culinary traditions that I’m learning from all the amazing cooks that I meet around the world.
It’s exciting to be able to pass those on, and especially to not just other adults who are excited about food like me, but other parents who recognise, like you said, that there is immense learning and growth and possibility in sharing these things with your children. Opening them up to the possibility that they can do that with their children, and that the children don’t have to wait until they’re adults like I did to be able to explore that fully.
Chris Sandel: Is that what Our Kitchen Classroom is about?
Karen Ricks: That’s it exactly. It’s traveling the world without leaving your kitchen. It’s learning and discovering new things not just about food, but language and history and world cultures and geography – so many different things, and food is just the instructional medium.
Chris Sandel: We talked earlier about obviously your dieting history; with Our Kitchen Classroom, are you explicit about “I’m trying to create a generation where that’s not going to happen”? Or is it “I don’t even need to focus on that explicitly if I’m just able to show how much joy there can be through cooking or how exciting it can be” – that by taking in that message, it will deflect the other messages around dieting?
Karen Ricks: With children, I don’t feel like I have to be as explicit, mostly because they haven’t been exposed to so many of the damaging messages of diet culture to the extent that they’ve begun to internalise them. I can say that having so many years of working with especially young children – and I mean young like under the age of six.
When I’m working with adults, though, I am explicit about it. In our Play With Your Food community, I very clearly articulate that to all new members, to make sure that as they come and join in this virtual space where we’re sharing ideas and inspiration and recipes and techniques and all this around food, I want to make absolutely sure that the people who come in leave the diet culture stuff at the door. So many of the things that I know I personally had begun to internalise can affect all of the good stuff that happens with the negativity that we really want to leave out.
So with adults, I am very clear. If people have particular dietary restrictions, whether by choice or because of allergies or medical conditions or something, that’s absolutely okay. But what we don’t want is to impose those arbitrary food rules because – and I see this in my communication with my clients every day – all it does is interferes with and interrupts the joy. It interrupts the love. It just gets in the way of play.
I use that word ‘play’ very purposefully too, because we as adults have also been infected, if you will, with this idea that serious things deserve serious conversation and very serious consideration, and that fun, that joy, that laughter are somehow outside of the realm of learning. So my whole mission is to disrupt that nonsense, to show people how much fun, how joyous the learning can be.
When we play with foods and we make all the foods delicious, it’s just extending a warm invitation to welcome everybody to the table.
Chris Sandel: Nice. Are a lot of people who are in that group coming from a place of recovering from dieting and they really need to have that message by quite explicit because that’s the kinds of people you’re attracting?
Karen Ricks: I attract a really wide range of people. I wasn’t as explicit in that messaging when I first started, probably more so because I think most of my initial clients were more focused on the cooking skills and techniques with young children.
But as Our Kitchen Classroom continues to grow, as I grow and continue to gain confidence, as I’m more and more comfortable sharing more about my history, my background, the trauma, even, that has brought me to the place that I am today, I find that I am attracting more people who have similar traumatic food histories like I do. It’s because of wanting to create that safe space for all of our fun food fans that I am as explicit as I am now about making sure that people are kind and compassionate, and sometimes even just careful about the sorts of self-deprecating things they’ve gotten used to saying about themselves that we have to be more conscious about eliminating from our vocabulary.
Our words have power, and I want to be sure to encourage and empower people with the words and the messages and the pictures and the lessons that I share.
01:34:55
Chris Sandel: Yeah. I think you’ve done a great job in terms of picking a title, Play With Your Food. You’re saying a lot with including the word ‘play’ in the title, so hopefully people are getting a sense of what they’re going to get before they get very deep into it.
Karen Ricks: Yes. I was really intentional about that. And I do literally play with food. [laughs] My introductory video where I invite people to introduce themselves to the community, I’m juggling oranges. I want people to embrace the fun and the playful aspect of it.
I know that as adults, sometimes for us that’s really hard. It takes a lot of practice to set aside the rules that society has told us we have to follow in order to be able to try something new. It’s a lot of fun for me to help people break down those walls and learn to enjoy something that has maybe not always been an enjoyable experience in their lives.
Chris Sandel: It comes back to this idea of using children as a guiding light. We’re so much encouraging children to play and seeing the importance of play and how helpful that is in terms of curiosity, how helpful that is in terms of intrinsic motivation, laughter, etc. If we can just remember that that doesn’t stop – you don’t hit some age where that is now no longer important.
Sure, that’s a more difficult job when you are an adult and you have real adult struggles that have to be dealt with, but as you said, you don’t always have to take the serious tone. There are lots of different ways that you can be dealing with this, especially around the area of food. Being able to be curious and play and enjoy – as much as the culture that we live in can often tell us that those things are bad, and that if you’re enjoying your food, you’re obviously eating something that you shouldn’t be eating, I really don’t agree with that.
I find that when clients can get to a place where they are feeling freedom around food and they are able to enjoy it, they not only feel better psychologically, but they feel better physically. It works that it helps them to be healthier – and not just ‘healthier’.
Karen Ricks: Yes, absolutely. It almost saddens me that that word ‘healthy’ even has become a kind of sticky place to be, because that word has so many negative implications for a lot of people. You talked about things being ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’ has kind of become a replacement for those ‘good’ and ‘bad’ categorisations of food.
One of the things that I really delight in doing is shaking that up. I share messages and pictures of making cake for breakfast or having breakfast for dinner. These enormous salads as the first meal of the day is something that I certainly didn’t grow up with – but the idea that it can be a joyous, sensual, multisensory experience with whatever food at any time of the day or night, and it doesn’t have to have any of these arbitrary restrictions that society has told us we have to follow.
It’s like you said; there are so many people for whom the food experience has not been a pleasant one because we get this message that if you’re enjoying it, if it really tastes good, if it feels good, then maybe you shouldn’t be having that. And that’s just not true. When we can let go of those rules, when we can let go of the guilt that comes with that, not only is the food more delicious, but every other aspect of our lives becomes something more enjoyable to savour.
When we’re restricting the food, it’s a pattern that spills out into other aspects of life, but when we can let our guard down, when we can really relax and enjoy nourishing our bodies, it’s something else that spills over into being able to really nourish our souls.
I was telling a friend just the other day that one of the things that continues to encourage me along this journey is the recognition that now that I am really feeding myself and not restricting in any way, I have become a more energetic, a more enthusiastic, a more joyful person to be around.
And this gift that I’ve given to myself has really freed me to be able to more freely share my gifts, my skills, my talent, the things that I am most passionate about, with all of the people that I come into contact with. That’s been great for my family, that’s been great for my students. It’s great for everybody that interact with. And that’s the ripple effect that I want to see spreading out across millions of people all over the world.
Chris Sandel: That’s a wonderful idea that you’re hoping will have that ripple effect. I think what you’re talking about there is being more present and then having the ability and the headspace to be able to follow your passions and to be doing things that are worthy of your time as opposed to time being stolen on things that you’re in a hamster wheel, unable to escape from.
Karen Ricks: Exactly. When we step off of that hamster wheel, expending all that energy going nowhere, then we can actually spend that time and effort doing the things that are really most meaningful in our lives – applying it to the things that we really and truly do want to prioritise. As I said, that frees us up to really give the best of ourselves to everybody else around us.
Chris Sandel: Nice. Karen, this has been a wonderful conversation. Is there anything that we haven’t touched on that you wanted to touch on or you hoped we’d be able to discuss?
Karen Ricks: I think we covered just about everything, Chris. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: The final question that I have is just where can people go if they’re wanting to find out more information about you? I’m going to put everything in the show notes, but you can tell our listeners.
Karen Ricks: Thanks so much. It’s easiest to reach out and find us on our website at ourkitchenclassroom.com. From there, obviously we have other links to our other presence on social media platforms – our Play With Your Food community, where we share all of those fun, inspirational ideas and just snapshots from our day to day food journey, wherever we happen to be in the world or wherever we might like to be. We’ve got lessons and conversations on our YouTube channel and pictures on Instagram. You can look for the hashtag #OurKitchenClassroom.
And people can follow me personally, too. I share so much of our travel journey and the things that inspire the food on my personal Facebook page as well – and I love when people have had a chance to listen and hear snippets of our story and want to follow and learn more. So feel free to reach out on any of those and just say hi. Tell me you found us here in this great conversation with you, Chris.
Chris Sandel: I’ll put all of that in the show notes, and thank you so much for your time. This has been incredible, and it’s so lovely to hear about your journey with food and to the place that you’re at now, but also the world travel and living a life that is very different to many people, but is working so well for you guys.
Karen Ricks: I really appreciate you giving me the opportunity to share just a little bit. As I said, when I was a child – even just a few years ago – I never heard, I never knew that it was possible to live a life like this. It’s a real privilege to be able to share that with your listeners and give them the opportunity to dream bigger and to imagine even more.
Chris Sandel: That was my conversation with Karen Ricks. She is such a bubbly human being, and her life and way of being is a testament to what can happen if you get to the other side of issues around food and body.
As I mentioned at the top of the show, Seven Health is now taking on clients. If you’re interested in working together or finding out more, you can head over to seven-health.com/help. That is it for this week’s show. I will be back next week with another new episode. Stay safe, and I will catch you then.
Thanks so much for joining this week. Have some feedback you’d like to share? Leave a note in the comment section below!
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