Titled “Womentum marches on” Jackson Hole News & Guide Contributor Tibby Plasse interviewed Womentum Executive Director Kristen Fox and event panelist licensed clinical social worker and registered dietitian nutritionist Mary Ryan on March 1, 2023.
March 6, 2024
Womentum’s spring panel, “March Onward,” returns with themes of health, wellness, and practice.
The event takes on the more personal aspects of the organization’s mission to help women thrive by asking hard questions around nutrition, diet and healthy habits with local experts family medicine physician Dr. Kelly Baxter, licensed clinical social worker and registered dietitian nutritionist Mary Ryan, national board-certified health and wellness coach Tanya Mark and registered dietitian and certified intuitive eating counselor Eden Morris.
This year’s panel was an organic evolution from brainstorming conversations between Ryan, Morris and Mark last fall. By November, Morris reached out to Womentum’s executive director, Kristen Fox.
“Our mission statement is to thrive as leaders, and so this really addresses that thrive component,” Fox said. “It’s hard to describe when your mental space is so fixated on you not being enough.”
For Fox, making the connection between capacity and potential is inherently tied to successful individual wellness management. Fox said she had some great conversations with Morris that resonated with her.
“Especially with Jackson being such an outdoor-focused town and realizing how there are a lot of issues of being obsessed,” Fox said. “I learned what ‘orthorexia,’ was and I had not heard that word before.”
Orthorexia is defined by the National Eating Disorders Association as an obsession with healthy eating. The association’s website augments that with, “Although being aware of and concerned with the nutritional quality of the food you eat isn’t a problem in and of itself, people with orthorexia become so fixated on so-called ‘healthy eating’ that they actually damage their own well-being and experience health consequences such as malnutrition and/or impairment of psychosocial functioning.”
Fox said, “We need to be educated. We need to understand what tools are there and to be grounded in our purpose and how to show up fully as ourselves.”
Fox pointed to an Instagram post shared by fellow panelist Tanya Mark, saying history doesn’t talk about how much Rosa Parks, Florence Nightingale or Malala Yousafzsi weighed.
Mary Ryan, who has called the Tetons home for decades and who has served the community in multiple modalities — from a dietitian to a social worker — agrees we need a new understanding of what “healthy” should mean.
“Diet culture in Jackson plays out as wellness culture — and that’s not so black and white,” Ryan said. “Plenty of people do things like Whole 30 and keto and paleo and all that stuff, but I think in Jackson we like to think of ourselves as healthy and more evolved and we’re so active, and so people don’t recognize when you cross that line: eating healthier to feel good or because you’re concerned about the environment. And when does that that turn into an obsession?”
Ryan said there are many things that can make people anxious on a daily basis, and food and exercise should not be one of them.
“For me the link between physical and mental health are so intertwined, the fact that we even separate them is arbitrary,” Ryan said.
Ryan, along with the other panelists, will be sharing their stories of how they have discovered professions and the successful mechanism that they have activated for clients and patients to thrive.
Attendees will be able to submit questions anonymously via email before the event Thursday at 6:30 p.m. at the National Museum of Wildlife Art. Youth can attend for free, and scholarships are available for anyone who needs financial assistance. After the panel there will be tables outside the auditorium with resources for attendees and time to just enjoy conversation and ask more questions with the panelists.
Ryan said she will be sharing information from podcasts to practitioners to research to articles.
March is Women’s History Month, and March Onward takes place on the eve of International Women’s Day.