Navigating Holidays and Eating Disorders - A How to Guide

Well, it’s officially holiday season. Whatever you celebrate, there is bound to be some family or friend time, a good amount of food, and lots and lots of negative food and body talk. Holidays and eating disorders are not a match made in heaven. 

For many, holidays can make bad body image moments worse, especially when we are around others who are not yet on the anti-diet culture bandwagon. You also don’t need to have an eating disorder diagnosis to experience this discomfort - many people have a difficult relationship with food due to dieting, disordered eating, or negative body image.

One thing that we can do to help us navigate this is to go in with a plan. We can recognize that there are things in our lives that will cause anxiety or discomfort, and that there are things in our outside world that we have little control over (ie other people’s comments on food and body) while also knowing that we can handle difficult situations when they arise. Basically a big old YOU GOT THIS (with a little help of course because we all deserve to be cared for and supported).

There are lots of ways to arm ourselves with a plan for what to do if we are experiencing negative food and body talk around the holidays. We can decide ahead of time how we might want to respond to these comments. It also can be helpful to make an eating plan and put down some ground rules around what *healthy holiday eating looks like. 

*When I say health, I mean supporting yourself both mentally and physically. This does not include dieting, restricting, or stopping yourself from eating the foods that you love.

What it looks like to navigate the holidays and eating disorders

Picture this - you are at Aunt Sally’s house for your yearly family get together. The house is all decked out in holiday decor and you can feel the excitement of being together. 

There is a ton of food around - everyone has gone all out on their favorite dishes that they only make once during the year. You get your plate all loaded up, sit down to enjoy and hear the classic line “all of this fatty food is going to go right to my hips!” 

From there it is a spiral of body shaming, with everyone picking themselves apart. You might even have a family member or two who bring their own food or barely put anything on their plate, stating that they are on X diet and can’t “indulge.”

Sound familiar?

Yea, I thought so. The truth is that managing the holidays and eating disorders can feel nearly impossible. The urge to toss all of your hard work aside and give into body shaming and food behaviors is probably there. 

The truth is that we live in a culture that encourages these types of statements and they unfortunately are likely not going way any time soon.

Just because those around you want to shame themselves about their negative body image does not mean you need to jump on board! Luckily, you have given this some thought beforehand and have a plan to ensure that you don’t fall into the diet culture trap.

Let’s talk about some ways to navigate a situation where there is any kind of negative food or body talk:

Walk Away

Literally do just that - leave the situation. Make an excuse if you need to (make a phone call, go to the bathroom, etc), but if you feel best completely removing yourself from the situation then go for it. You are allowed to put up this boundary - that you do not need to leave yourself in a situation that feels uncomfortable. And you don’t need to explain yourself to anyone if you don’t want to.

For many of us who have worked towards eating disorder recovery, ditching dieting, or embracing our bodies as they are, it can be a difficult balance to figure out how to respond in these types of situations. There are going to be times where you feel really confident and want to help someone else see the anti-diet light, and other times where you need to protect your sanity and get yourself out of that situation.

There is absolutely no shame in walking away from these situations, and for most people this can be the best place to start. Navigating the holidays and eating disorders means figuring out the best plan of action for you.

Don’t Let Bad Body Image Talk Happen - Make a Statement

Feeling a little more bold? Go ahead and let them know that you don’t feel comfortable with that particular conversation. Depending on your comfort level, there are all sorts of statements that you can make. There is no right or wrong answer here! 

In case you are not sure what type of statements you can make, here are a few examples:

• I prefer not to talk about food that way

• I don’t find it helpful to talk about food/my body like that so I don’t really want to talk about it!

• I don’t like to talk negatively about my body (or anyone else’s for that matter!)

• Wow you guys talk so negatively about yourselves!

• Let’s not talk negatively, I don’t want the kids to hear this type of stuff

Feel free to play around with whatever level of sass you want to give! For example, if you are feeling extra spicy you could say something like “Maybe you should look at your relationship with food - diet culture really has its claws in you. It must be hard to live your life that way!” 

Feel free to copy and paste that last one into your notes app if you need it :)

Change the Subject

It can be helpful to come with a few ideas of subjects you would rather talk about. You know, some super neutral ones like climate change, world politics, etc. Or maybe something a little more light - new music you are into or a trip you took this past year.

Most people will take the cue that if you change the subject that you aren’t interested in the current conversation. If this isn’t the case and someone continually comes back to this topic, feel free to use any of the statements from the tip above to try and veer them away from that particular convo. 

For those of you working on your relationship with food or embracing intuitive eating, navigating food choices can also feel overwhelming. Managing the holidays and eating disorders can be especially difficult when it comes to food and being out of our normal routines. 

Whether you are in recovery from an eating disorder or struggle with your relationship with food in any way, we all could use some tips for navigating food options during the holidays

4 Tips for Healthy Holiday Eating:

Eat regular meals throughout the day

You may feel the urge to “save up” for that big meal later on, but this can make it way more difficult to navigate that meal. You deserve to eat frequently throughout the day, even on a day where meals look a little different. Eat breakfast and lunch, and snacks as you normally would. We don’t want you heading into your holiday dinner starving - it will absolutely not help you eat intuitively. 

Remember that this day is really no different than any other when it comes to food. We need to eat to nourish ourselves no matter what. Remember that getting through the holidays and eating disorders might mean having to step out of your comfort zone. 

Let yourself eat what you want

Give yourself full permission to have whatever sounds good to you. Hopefully you have been practicing this skill in your day to day already, but even if you haven’t you still deserve to eat what you like. 

Go slow - take a walk around and take it all in, check in with what sounds good to you and go for it!

Pay attention to your fullness cues

Remind yourself that you are giving yourself permission to eat these foods whenever you want. When you are at a level of fullness that feels good to you, take a break from eating and see how you feel. 

You can always get more! Also remember that it is normal to eat more food at a holiday meal than you might otherwise - sometimes the food available is something special that maybe grandma makes once a year. There is no “right” level of fullness - for some this might mean feeling a little stuffed on a day like this.

Ask to take home leftovers

If you are noticing that you feel like you have to eat all the things because you don’t want to miss out or feel deprived afterwards, lean into some leftovers! Ask the host if you can take some of your favorite things to go - you might be less likely to feel like this is your only chance to have the yummy food. And hosts are typically trying to offload all the food so it doesn’t go bad in their fridge - they will probably happy take you up on your offer!

So who’s ready to tackle the holiday season? Hopefully the above tips give you a sense of what you can do or say to make navigating holiday events just a little easier. Things might still feel really hard, and I want you to remember that it is normal to feel that way. Figuring out how to navigate the holidays and eating disorders takes a lot of work but is so worth it. Even those of us who have been doing this work a long time get triggered and sometimes find it difficult to navigate tricky conversations. We might also struggle with listening to our hunger and fullness cues and feel like we “blew it.” I can assure you that it is nearly impossible to do this perfectly - you can only prepare the best you can and do what feels right for you.

This time of year can be tough for many, and if you are struggling you deserve support! If you are looking for a therapist in FL, I would love to connect and see if we would be a good fit to work together. I work with clients who want to work on their relationship with food, body, and themselves - whether you have been diagnosed with an eating disorder, or simply feel that you struggle with the what/when/where/how of feeding yourself. 

I Hate My Body and Leaning Into Body Grief

Diet and wellness culture teach us to hate our bodies 

How often do you have the thought that you hate your body? I know that I have had this thought many times over the years. I hear it from clients sitting in my office who want to feel better. I hear it from friends and family as they pick themselves apart for any number of reasons. I hear it from coworkers and strangers on the street. This idea of hating our bodies is SO common that we accept it as a truth.

But what do we actually mean when we say this? For a lot of people, this statement around hating their body is deeply connected to diet and wellness culture.

Christy Harrison, a dietitian and author of The Wellness Trap, defines wellness culture as: “a set of values that equates wellness with moral goodness, and posits certain behaviors—and a certain type of body—as the path to achieving that supposed rectitude.” In other words, wellness culture tells us that there is really only one way to have a “good enough” body, and that we should be on the constant path to achieving this. It also tells us that we have total control over our health and well-being, and that we should remain focused on this at all costs.

Where do you see wellness culture showing up in your life?

Some of the ways we might see wellness culture in our day to day:

• Diet plan advertisements that tell us it is the answer to achieving the “perfect body”

• Ideas around “never missing a day” of exercise even at the expense of our mental or physical health

• Forcing yourself to do self-care practices that don’t feel good because you are “supposed to”

• Eating only “clean foods” because of fear mongering around certain ingredients (even if you don’t like those foods or have trouble accessing them financially)

In a culture that is deeply entrenched in wellness culture and diet culture, it is no wonder that we are so focused on our bodies and any supposed “flaws” that we can find. This idea of having a “good enough” body is reinforced at every turn and is often difficult to get space from. It is not so easy to heal in an environment that continues to talk about and push the thing you are trying to heal from.

Our relationship with food takes us out of our body

Have you struggled with your relationship with food? Perhaps you have been on diets (either for a short time or chronically - meaning you have dieted for many years), or have been diagnosed with (or feel strongly that you should be diagnosed with) disordered eating or an eating disorder. Wherever you might fall on this spectrum, ways that we “deal” with this negative relationship with food all have the same outcome - they take us OUT of our body and following some arbitrary set of rules or ideas about how we should interact with food.

This is important to understand, because when we are living outside of our body, it makes it easier to criticize and compare. Wellness culture, diet culture, our relationship with food, eating disorders - it all compounds on itself and makes it so that hating our bodies is both accepted and encouraged. No wonder that we have thoughts around hating our bodies - we are taught that this is the way we SHOULD feel.

Why simply “being grateful” for our body falls short

A lot of well-meaning people might give you some tips on how to do this, including the idea of being grateful for your body. Now I don’t disagree with this sentiment, but I do know that this statement is easier said than done.You might have even tried to do this by listing out things you are grateful for, such as the ability to experience the world in your body, or that it has “carried you where you need to go.”

So why does it feel like this falls short? One possible answer to this is that it is hard to be grateful for a demonized body. This can feel very true for those of us that live in fat, disabled, or non-white bodies. When we have been told that certain bodies are bad, it makes it very difficult to be grateful for that body.

You might also be struggling with trying to implement ideas like body positivity - which again, make sense in theory, but can be very difficult to implement in real life. If you hate your body, the idea of feeling positively about it can feel like a giant leap. Even the idea of body acceptance might feel daunting. How can we be expected to accept our body when the world around us tells us its wrong?

Now I’m not saying that body acceptance or body positivity are unhelpful - far from it! I think that these can be really useful tools depending on the person. But, for those of you that might have a hard time feeling like these ideas are doable for you, I want to offer another place to start: body grief.

What is body grief?

Body grief is the loss that we feel around the body that we could have had, or possibly had at one time. This includes feelings around the “what ifs” - for example, feeling like you have been waiting for your life to begin once you achieve that “perfect body” that you may have been aiming for (note that is in quotes because it does not actually exist!). Body grief doesn’t only have to do with weight (although for a lot of people there is a lot of grief around body size), and also can include grief around changing ability or mobility.

Similarly to grief around other things in our lives, body grief has its ups and downs. It may be something that you continuously process, especially considering that natural bodies do continue to change over time and as we age.

Some of the ways I have experienced body grief:

I stopped getting body compliments

For the 20 or so years that I dieted and struggled with my relationship with food, I would always get excited when my body would shrink because that would typically mean getting compliments from others. I talk often with my clients that there is truly nothing like the “high” you feel when someone compliments you. These compliments felt so good because it was proof that I was being “good” and doing what our culture expected me to do. 

Having a harder time fitting in public spaces

When I was in a smaller body I never had to worry about fitting in certain seats or making sure a seatbelt would buckle. We can experience a huge amount of body grief when our body feels like it “doesn’t fit” any more. In this situation it would NOT have been helpful for me to simply appreciate me body and let it go. I needed to grieve this. I needed to grieve the fact that the world is not made for all body sizes. I needed to grieve that I might need to speak up and advocate for my comfort which is not always so easy. What was helpful was leaning into this grief in these moments, which also allowed me to NOT blame my body or myself and instead make it known that certain places are not accommodating when they should be.

Trying to shrink my body was my entire identity

I was so attached to the idea of changing my body that I had no idea who I was without it. So much of who I was felt tied to this idea - from the books that I bought to career choices. There was so much grief in acknowledging how much time and energy I put into this and what I could have been focusing on instead. I had to grieve the fact that I didn’t even know what I wanted for myself, and that diet and wellness culture had stolen years from me that I would never get back. Not letting myself feel this would have made it harder for me to decide to live differently.

How would it feel to truly grieve the body that you are longing for? Instead of trying to put a positive spin on how we are feeling about our body, or try to find some bit of gratefulness for it, what would it be like to accept that you might be grieving for a body that you don’t have?

How to let body grief in

If the idea of body grief resonates with you, you might be wondering how to let these feelings in. Here are a few ways to do this:

Show yourself some compassion and lean in

If this is the first time you are hearing about or letting yourself experience body grief, let the idea just be there. Notice what feelings you have around it and lean into them. Instead of avoiding big feelings about it (as we often do as a way of protecting ourselves), lean into those feelings. Avoiding the feelings doesn’t make them go away, so instead, acknowledge that they are there and let yourself experience them. Learning how to coexist with our feelings is such an important way to know that we can feel what we are feeling without those emotions completely hijacking us.

Reflect on what you know about diet culture and reject the idea that weight loss won’t fix your body grief

When faced with thoughts of hating our body, many of us will turn to ways of shrinking our body and pursue weight loss. This is heralded as the “solution” to feeling bad about ourselves - if the problem is the size of our body, then the answer is clearly weight loss, right?

This message is pushed on us from all sides as well - whether it is at our doctor’s office, from family and friends who think they are helping, and in self-help books galore. It feels like “common knowledge” that this is THE answer to our negative feelings about our bodies. When discussing my struggles with my own body years ago, my own therapist even told me that I should try going on a diet. This shit is everywhere, my friends, even in our safe spaces.

Do meaningful things even amidst the grief

Reflect on what you truly want out of life and what you value. What are the things that bring you meaning? What fills you up? The answer here isn’t to find a way to move past the grief and do these things, but instead to FEEL the grief AND do meaningful things at the same time. 

It’s normal to feel like we hate our bodies because we have been taught to do so. We are told over and over again that our bodies are not good enough and that we need to change them. The first step to getting out of this cycle is recognizing that it is happening and that it is NOT your fault. How would it feel to lean into body grief and let yourself feel the disappointment around the body you thought you were supposed to have? The body that you were taught was “right?”

If you find yourself struggling with your relationship with your body or exploring body grief, you aren’t alone. You also deserve help if you are struggling and need guidance. As a body image therapist in Florida, I would be happy to walk alongside you and help you unlearn while also building the skills and mindset to make meaningful choices in your life.

4 Simple Tips to Help Make Peace with Food

Welcome back to my series all about the principles of Intuitive Eating and how to start implementing them in your day to day life. So far we have talked about how to reject the diet mentality, and ways to honor your hunger. In this post we are going to dive into the 3rd principle, which talks about making peace with food. Now I know that this might feel like a tall order, especially if you are coming to intuitive eating from a place of chronic dieting or an eating disorder. Remember that sometimes what’s in the way is the way! Making peace with food is an important part of becoming an intuitive eater, and letting go of of food guilt and restriction will help you on this journey.

Making Peace with Food - What Exactly Does that Mean?

How often do you find yourself referring to food as “good” and “bad?” My guess is that it is pretty often, especially since this is the way we are socialized to think and talk about food. We assign some kind of moral “code” to the foods we think we should or should not be having, which in the end often leads to restriction and ignoring our own feelings of hunger and fullness (a key part of becoming an intuitive eater as we have discussed!)

Making peace with food is the first step in tuning in around what you actually enjoy (and later what your body actually enjoys), and being able to listen to your body and its needs. This leads to a more balanced approach to food, less restriction, and improved mental health.

How diet culture leads us astray

Have you ever watched a baby or young child eat? Most parents are keenly aware of the ways that their kids eat - some days they inhale their food and try all the things, and other days they pick and make you crazy, thinking that there is no way that they are getting enough. The truth is that these kids are intuitive eaters - they listen to their body and cues and have no moral feelings around foods. We know that for most this will end up changing over time, especially once they start to receive messaging from (typically well-intentioned) caregivers and other adults in their lives.

Once diet culture interferes with our thoughts around food, our ability to see foods as neutral plummets, making it more and more difficult to feel any kind of peace around what we eat. The food rules that diet culture preach tell us the what/when/where/how of eating and put rules in place that lead to good/bad thinking around food. 

Think about some of the diets you have been on and the foods you craved while you were on it. Can you remember being on a diet where you were restricting certain foods or food groups and those foods were ALL you could think about? Ever switch to a different type of diet or food plan and found yourself craving the things you were previously eating on the last diet? This is common and to be expected. The more we restrict ourselves (and remember that restriction does not have to be all about quantity - not allowing yourself to eat a particular food is also a form of restriction), the more we crave that forbidden food and feel that we would be absolutely “out of control” if it were around. I know it sounds counterintuitive, but the way to feel in control around all foods is to give yourself access to ALL foods,

Food guilt

Letting foods simmer in categories of “good” and “bad” can have a serious emotional impact. This can lead to negative feelings around food and your body, heightened anxiety around food and life events involving food, and serious amounts of shame and guilt. When we label foods in this way we set ourselves up to “get it wrong” in situations where we might not be following the rules we have placed on ourselves.

Take this all too common scenario:

You decide to follow a diet, cutting out certain foods or limiting your intake → at first things feel great, you get a rush of serotonin and your “willpower” is at an all time high → you go to an event that includes food and resist as long as possible, but end up “giving in” to foods that were on your “bad” list → cue the guilt, shame, and feeling like you have messed up in some enormous way → you say “screw it” and eat whatever you want, leading to more guilt and shame → you continue eating this way since you “fell off the wagon” until you feel so much anxiety that you vow to start your next diet tomorrow → and the cycle starts over again.

Sound familiar? If you think through this scenario, could your food intake have possibly been more stable if you hadn’t been fighting against food rules in the first place at that event? The truth is that when we restrict ourselves, we are setting ourselves up to repeat this same cycle over and over again. These feelings of shame and guilt tend to grow larger over time as we become more and more frustrated with this process. Depriving ourselves of certain foods or amounts of food can also lead to increased intake due to both physical hunger and the mental impact of restriction.

Why we need to allow all foods

Part of making peace with food is giving yourself unconditional permission to eat. This means allowing yourself access to all foods whenever you want/need them. Yes, this can mean that you eat more of certain foods for a while. For some this might feel like “overeating” but what it often means is that there has been a level of restriction and your body needs to find its way back to balance. If we don’t truly allow ourselves to have unconditional permission, we can end up in the same cycle of deprivation and cravings that many of us are in for years.

Now for some practical tips on how to make peace with food!

4 Simple Tips to Help Make Peace with Food

Keep food at home

For many people stuck in the food restriction cycle, it can feel scary to actually keep food in your home. Thoughts around being “out of control” around food or “not trusting” yourself are common concerns, and it is valid that you have felt this way. The problem is that keeping food out of our house leaves us in the same place we are trying to get out of - feeling deprived and potentially ignoring our hunger cues

To be clear - there is nothing wrong with eating outside your home and it is absolutely encouraged and necessary! But, we also need to make sure that we have food on hand for when we want to eat, and to have a variety of it.  Start by taking stock of your pantry and fridge and notice if you have a variety of foods and a quantity that makes sense for you and your family. Make a plan for going food shopping on a schedule that works for you and stick to it. Trust this process and the importance of having food around, even if it is bringing up negative or scary feelings. When feelings come up, simply notice them - these feelings will be important for moving through what might be holding you back from making peace with food.

Make a list

It can be a helpful and really powerful exercise to think about the foods that you have not been allowing yourself to access, or the ones that you feel guilty around eating when you do have them. Take out a piece of paper or open the notes app on your phone and make a list of all the foods that you have labeled “bad” or have been avoiding in some way.

If you are having trouble making the list, you can go through meals of the day and see what comes up. For example, what foods might you like to have for breakfast but you don’t allow yourself to? What snacks make you feel guilty after eating them? Maybe reflect on your favorite childhood foods and ask yourself if you have been letting yourself have them. It’s ok if there are a lot of foods on your list! This will simply give you more options to experiment with moving forward.

Pick a food from the list and stock it in your house

Now, take a look at that list and pick a food (or a few if you can!) and make a plan to bring that food into your home. If you can, really stock that food in your fridge/pantry - meaning don’t just buy 1 package, but buy a few so that it is truly in abundance (I know that there could be some financial barriers here so just do the best you can). For example, when I wanted to make peace with ice cream, I bought 5 cartons of it and left it in my freezer. If I had only purchased 1 carton, I may have felt the urge to ration it, or once I finished it would be back to feeling like I didn’t have access. When you truly stock a food, you are letting your brain know that you really have unconditional access to that food.

A few things can happen here - you might find that you eat some of that food and don’t finish it, or you might eat a lot of that food each day. This is normal and can last a while, so really commit to making sure that food is available to you when you want it. Even if your desire to continue eating that food lasts a while, I promise that it won’t last forever! Most people find that they eventually tire of (or habituate to) that particular food and can “take it or leave it” at a certain point. Again, there is no timeline on this and it is different for every person. Know up front that you might be digging into that food for a while, especially if you have been restricting it for some time.

Depending on how you feel, you can start this process with 1 food item or a few! Listen to your gut and do what feels right to you. Once you find that you have made peace with a certain food, continue to keep some around for a while, and move on to the next items on your list until you have truly given yourself permission to have the foods that you have been avoiding.

Let yourself sit with the feelings that come up

As we talked about earlier, you are probably going to have some big feelings while you actively are making peace with food. You might have worries or concerns about your weight or health, or feel guilt or shame around eating foods that may have been off-limits for a very long time. There might be parts of you that have an extreme reaction to this change and have valid feelings, especially when we have been fed misinformation about foods being good/bad or healthy/unhealthy.

When these feelings come up, notice them. Trying to push them away can often lead to more of a struggle, which can make things feel worse and give those thoughts way more power than they need/deserve. Try this short mindfulness exercise (developed from ACT - Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) to see what it can feel like to just let thoughts be there:

Sit in a comfortable position and close your eyes if that feels good to you. Push your feet into the floor and feel your body - your bottom on the seat, your feet on the floor, your back up against your seat. Let yourself feel your physical body and notice it. Then, notice that you are also having thoughts. Notice them coming and going, and if you feel yourself getting too hooked into one, try to take a step back and let it go by. Now notice your body again, pushing your feet into the floor, feeling the fact that you both have a body and have thoughts. Whenever you notice that you’ve been hooked in by a particular thought (which is normal and ok), simply notice it, and let the thought go. Don’t push your thoughts away, just let them be and float by (or hang around) on their own time. Feel your body once more and open your eyes.

How’d you do? Practicing mindfulness can be such a great tool to help you engage differently with thoughts that come up. You might also have parts of you that want some hard data, and reading the intuitive eating book can also help you understand some research studies regarding the physical and mental benefits of making peace with food.

Remember that the process of making peace with food (and all of the other principles of IE) are not linear. You might feel you have made peace with a certain food and then find yourself falling back into old patterns. That is normal and to be expected! If you notice this has happened, just circle back to some of the skills above and keep on going. When I originally read about IE, I went back to dieting and took years to really implement these changes. Give yourself compassion and kindness while navigating this huge change. And remember that if you need additional support on your journey, to connect with a Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor. As a Florida therapist, I would be honored to walk alongside you while you navigate this - feel free to check out more about what Intuitive Eating Therapy can look like for you!

5 Roadblocks to Giving Up Dieting & Accepting Your Body

What gets in the way of learning how to accept your body and give up dieting?

Making the decision to give up dieting is no easy feat. This has likely required coming to terms with the fact that dieting has not worked for you (even though it has been sold to you as the “solution” to all of your problems) which has probably taken a good amount of time and energy to understand and want to move on from.

If we have accepted that dieting does not work, why is it then so difficult to actually give up dieting itself? Shouldn’t it be pretty easy to take the next steps?

Giving up dieting is easier said than done for a myriad of reasons. These of course can differ for each person, but there are some striking realities when it comes to the world of going against diet culture. Taking a look at what some of these reasons are can help you learn how to accept your body and anticipate what some of the roadblocks may be. 

A little about my body story

I consider myself a chronic dieter. It was part of how I was raised, and was honestly one of the most consistent parts of my life for about 20 years. Feeling sad? Get on a diet. Unsure of where your life is headed? Oh here, try this brand new diet plan. Worrying that people might judge you about something? Oh yes, dieting is definitely the answer. And on and on it goes.

The first time I found Intuitive Eating (which was the first book I had ever read that actually told me NOT to diet and that it actually might be doing me harm), I gobbled it up and was so excited. “This is it!,” I thought - the answer to what was feeling like a never-ending struggle to change my body which was clearly not working and made me feel worse. So with all those good feels, why was it that I went back to dieting, not to return to that book until about 5 years later?

The problem is that no one told me just how difficult it would be to follow through on going against everything I had ever learned. Against everything I had “worked so hard” for. It felt like it should have been easier and no one around me was talking about trying to make this shift. I had never heard anyone talk about how to accept your body - I thought that the only way to feel “okay” with myself was to change the way that I looked. Let’s dive into some of the things that might get in the way of actually moving past dieting so that you are ready to take on this challenge.

5 Roadblocks to Giving Up Dieting and Accepting Your Body

1. We interact With Food Multiple Times a Day Every Day

Sometimes there are things in our lives that are not working for us and we need to get some distance from. When it comes to giving up dieting, it is literally impossible to “get some distance from” food. We need to engage with food every day, multiple times a day! When deciding to give up dieting you might be feeling anxious about what this looks like, and we need to do that “figuring out” while also continuing to nourish ourselves appropriately.

So what can we do to figure things out while also needing to continue to eat? My recommendation is to go easy on yourself and accept that this is going to take time. It is also not an inactive process - it might feel like you have been putting in a lot of effort to diet, and that ditching your diet will feel like the “opposite” and will take less energy. Unfortunately, because of all the unlearning that needs to be done, this might not feel like a super fluid process. But - just because something feels hard does not mean it isn’t worth doing! Take things slow - know that you are going to have to challenge some really deeply held beliefs and are going to have some internal pushback to this change.

2. We Have Been Trained Not to Trust Our Bodies 

Most of us have been conditioned from when we were tiny little humans that we couldn’t, under any circumstance, trust our own body. So how could it be easy to all of the sudden decide that you CAN trust your body? 

Think back to all of the messaging you have received around this - you were likely told that you “weren’t hungry and might be thirsty,” that foods you were interested in or enjoyed were “bad,” and that you “should be full” and “not want more” based on an arbitrary amount of food that was put in front of you for a meal. We were told over and over again that we could not trust internal messages from our body.

Keeping this in mind, how can we expect ourselves to just quickly figure out the “how-to” of listening to our body or connect with how to accept our body when we have been told not to. One good first step is to (without judgment) start listening to the signals you are getting from your body. In the same way you can perceive the feeling of tiredness (and subsequently putting yourself to bed), you can start to feel other internal workings. The key point here is that this is going to take time and effort to notice when your body is telling you that you are hungry, full, stressed out, etc. How would it feel to notice that you are hungry or craving something and to allow yourself to have it?  You might not be in a place where you can do this for every feeling that arises, but what if you did it once today? How might it feel to tune in to the parts of you asking for support and show them you are listening?

3. It Can Feel Super Uncomfortable + Body Grief

Ditching dieting and embracing a new way of connecting with your body is not all unicorns and rainbows. It can feel really uncomfortable, especially at first, which can leave some folks feeling like they are doing “the wrong thing.” For many of us, we are sold this idea that the way to tell if something is meaningful to us or not is if it “feels good” or if we “feel happy.” Well I have some news for you - not everything that is meaningful is going to feel great. Now I’m not saying that you aren’t going to potentially feel happiness or joy at some point in this journey, but it likely won’t feel that way immediately and we don’t have much control over the direction our brain goes in.

Unlearning diet culture (which tells us that we must follow certain rules to have a “good” body) will take time, effort, and grit. For many of us, this means truly leaning into some grief and a potential feeling of loss around the body we thought we eventually might have. The lie we are sold is pretty clear - do x, y, and z which will equal health and happiness. When we have to wrap our minds around this not being the truth, it can be a huge disappointment and a place for grief.

When you think about body grief, what does this bring up for you? For me it meant leaning into the idea that my body was the way that it was, and that it was unlikely for it to shrink or be something that it was not. I had to truly grieve this fact, which included grief around the world not being set up for folks in larger bodies. I needed to feel the grief around some things being more difficult for me, and that this, in fact, was not my fault in the way that it was told to me for so long.

4. It Feels Like You Are Swimming Upstream 

Deciding not to diet is typically not the “popular” choice. Figuring out how to move forward and accept your body may feel like you are completely swimming upstream from those around you. Picture this - you have made the decision not to diet and move away from diet culture, and then in your office you are all of the sudden thrown into a conversation with your colleagues/friends about the latest diet plan they are on. Perhaps they are talking negatively about their bodies (or the bodies of others), or using all the good/bad language around food and bodies that you are trying to move past. This can be so tough! We don’t decide to ditch dieting in a vacuum - we have to continue to live in a diet culture world that will potentially not understand what exactly we are doing and why.

So what can you do if you find yourself in this situation? First of all, you should anticipate it. Know that you WILL find yourself in situations like these and will need to figure out what your best course of action is. For the example above, you have a few choices. One choice is to decide that you are no longer going to engage in those types of conversations, and to either find a random excuse to leave, or to be upfront and tell people that the conversation they are having is just not for you. Another choice is to educate! If it feels comfortable you can share your story and explain why you are trying something different. What’s most important is that you feel safe and comfortable engaging in these conversations in whichever ways feels best to you. There is no one right answer.

5. Constant Diet Talk All Around Us

In addition to feeling like you might be fighting against the current with the other people in your life, you might also start to notice just how insidious diet culture is in our society. This is a “once you see it you can’t unsee it” type of situation. For example, in the last few days I experienced the following:

• A character on a favorite TV show going through cancer treatment and mentioning that he was “skinnier but that’s no tragedy” 

• Getting a popular diet bar in the mail 

• Hearing fatphobic slurs in music and on TV

• Having a doctor shame my kid for having a certain BMI

• Videos on social media about “calories not counting” while on vacation

And this was only over a few days! Imagine how it feels to have this information thrown at you day after day, week after week. It is a LOT. Again - we are not doing this in a vacuum. We have to continue to navigate the real world while also trying to completely go against the grain of our society and culture. This shit is no joke.

We are unlikely change society around us (although the more we speak out the more things can change), but if we go into it with open eyes and understand the reasons why it is everywhere, this can help us navigate situations. In the beginning you may feel angry at people and places that continue to reinforce shitty diet culture ideals, and that is ok. Feel all your feels and keep moving forward. Know that it gets easier with time.

It makes so much sense that it might have felt hard in the past or present to stop dieting and learn how to accept your body. Going into this change knowing what could potentially derail you can be important to know ahead of time and to process. You are doing the hard work of going up against generations of ideas that have told us that dieting is the “right” thing to do, and this has likely been reinforced time and time again. Remember that if you are struggling with your relationship with food or how to accept your body, you do not have to go it alone. Grab my free guide below, follow me on instagram for free content, or connect today for a free consult and to chat about how working with a HAES-aligned, anti-diet, Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor and therapist can help you on your journey.

6 Ways to Honor Your Hunger

Welcome back to my series all about how to start integrating the principles of intuitive eating in your life. You may have found this post from my original blog about intuitive eating, or from my last post talking about Principle #1 - Ditching the Diet Mentality. This post is all about Principle #2 - Honoring your Hunger. Keep following along as I go through each principle and hopefully make it just a tad bit easier to get started and move forward with intuitive eating!

Why You Need to Honor Your Hunger 

If you look up what the word hunger means, you will see a few different definitions ranging from the sensation that motivates us to consume food (as part of a biological mechanism that keep our energy stores filled so that we can do all the things we need to live) to a state of food insecurity, where folks don’t have access to the resources they need to be fed and well. 

What comes up for you when you think about the word hunger? For many of us, it can feel like a sensation we have been running from our entire lives. Diet culture and its focus on shrinking bodies poses hunger as a negative, and one that can completely derail us from our “goals.” Diet culture views hunger as the enemy, and pivots us in a direction of eating as little as possible to keep this feeling at bay.

Honoring our hunger, as the 2nd Intuitive Eating principle, is at the top of the list for good reason. We can Ditch the Diet Mentality and be well on our way to being an intuitive eater, but if we aren’t actually feeding ourselves adequately (adequately meaning physically enough plus other things that contribute to satisfaction such as taste and pleasure in general) then we are going to hit a brick wall. Honoring your hunger is an important step in reconnecting with your body and rebuilding trust that your body is giving you clues and information that needs to be listened to and respected

Getting in Touch With Your Body and Its Sensations (ie Honoring Your Body)

When was the last time you listened to what your body was telling you? Many of us have been told for so long not to trust our bodies that we truly have not been paying attention to what our body is trying to tell us. First of all, feeling this way is 100% valid and is not your fault. We live in a culture that literally tells us not to listen to our bodies. How many of you grew up with parents/caregivers/other adults that told you that there was no way you could be hungry and you should just “drink some water.” Or that you “just ate” (the portion someone else decided for you of course) so it didn’t make sense that you needed something more to eat. Sound familiar?

I just want to point out here that there are folx who (for lots of good reasons) will really struggle with their interoceptive awareness, or your awareness of your internal body signals. I do think that many people can work their way back to understanding these signals, but if for any reason this isn’t in the cards for you, there are other ways to honor your hunger and move towards intuitive eating.

So we’ve established that many of us have been avoiding or neglecting our body’s signals for quite some time. Now what? How do you start to honor your body? One of the first steps is taking a good look at your own self care. An overtired, overworked, underfed body is going to have a hard time tuning in to what is going on internally. There are some more practical tips below about how to engage in self care practices that work for you, but in the meantime, really tune in with how much attention you are paying to your physical and emotional states. If the idea of self care is something that is foreign to you, really take some time to dive in here.

What Hunger Feels Like (& How You Can Utilize a Hunger Fullness Scale)

Back to honoring your hunger and asking “what does hunger actually feel like?” Cue the face (that I see from many people) that screams “holy shit I don’t even know what it feels like to be hungry anymore.” Well you are in good company. A few things could be going on here, one of them being that you have been ignoring your hunger cues for so long that you actually *don’t* remember what they feel like. Some other possibilities are that when we aren't taking in enough nourishment, our body might be focused on other processes besides letting us know that we need food, OR you actually are feeling cues and are assuming it is something else.

Here are some common ways that we as humans experience hunger:

• Grumbling stomach (the classic)

• Feeling of physical “emptiness”

• Lightheadedness

• Nausea

• Irritability (aka being “hangry”)

• Headaches

• Anxiety

• Fatigue

• Increased thoughts about food

  Do any of those sound like something you have experienced before? One way that we can start experimenting with our feelings around hunger (and fullness for that matter) is to use something called a hunger fullness scale. Just your luck - I have made one that you can grab for free! This scale helps you pinpoint where you are at on a scale of really hungry to really full. My suggestion for using this scale is to whip it out at your usual mealtimes, and before you start eating do a 10 second check in. Try to close your eyes if that feels comfortable and check in with where your hunger levels are at and what you are feeling in your body. Then, take a look at the scale and try to see where you fall. Remember that this is a practice and it will take time to get used to it!

Why Intuitive Eating is NOT a Hunger/Fullness Diet

Now is the time for me to say something SUPER important. Intuitive Eating is NOT a hunger fullness diet. Yes we want to try to tune into our hunger and fullness cues which can assist us in knowing when we need to eat and when it might feel good to stop. BUT - if we say that we are only going to eat when we are at a certain point on the hunger scale and stop at a certain point, then this is putting yet another set of dieting rules onto us and we are trying to avoid that mentality at all costs. We are learning how to honor our body without all the rules.

There are plenty of situations where you will need to eat and honor your hunger when you are not feeling physically hungry. Here are a few examples:

• You know that you have an appointment/meeting coming up and won’t be able to eat for a while so you eat an early lunch even though you aren’t having any hunger cues yet

• You are at an amazing restaurant that you love and have been eyeing a special dessert but are feeling stuffed from dinner. You might not have access to this food typically so you decide that it’s ok to push past your fullness even if it might be uncomfortable 

• You are in a social situation where it feels customary to try some of what is being offered to you and you would like to participate even if you are not feeling hungry

There are obviously many more examples than the three above, but I share them to reinforce the idea that it is ok to eat when you are not hungry. The key here is knowing that this is a choice that you can make at any point while also honoring where your current hunger and fullness levels are.

Ok - enough of the back story. Here are some practical tips to truly try to honor your hunger!

6 Ways to Honor Your Hunger

1. Keep food stocked

We will talk more about this idea in a future blog around making peace with food, but for now focus on keeping food on hand. This could mean ensuring that you grocery shop each week (if necessary) to keep a variety of foods around, or making sure that you stick a few snacks in your work or school bag. What we want to avoid is getting into a situation where you feel hungry (yay for feeling that cue!) and don’t have access to food so that you can feel what this new pattern is like of honoring your body and hunger. If you are not sure yet what to stock up on, focus on quick and easy snacks and meal options that you know you enjoy and will fill you up.

2. Eat consistently and adequately throughout the day 

One great tip for trying to re-engage with your hunger cues is to ensure you are eating more consistently throughout the day. If you are really in a place where you don’t know what your hunger feels like, try to focus on eating 3 meals and 2 snacks to see how you feel (this does not need to be a hard and fast rule). If it is difficult to eat larger meals then set an alarm for every few hours and make sure you are eating either a small meal or a snack.

3. Ditch the clock and follow your cues

Unless you need to set timers as described above, try to ditch eating by what the clock says and focus more on how you are feeling. This is less about not eating a meal because you are “not hungry” and more about giving yourself permission to eat at whatever time of day if you are noticing some hunger cues. For example, you might eat lunch at noon and be hungry again at 2 for a multitude of reasons - maybe you didn’t eat enough or weren’t truly satisfied with the foods you ate. Also remember that there are no rules around the when/where/how of eating. You are allowed (and encouraged!) to honor your hunger whenever you need to. This is especially important when you are trying to re-establish your feelings around hunger and allow your body to trust that it can let you know when it needs to be fed.

4. Engage in consistent self care

As I spoke about above, there are many ways that our ability to feel our internal cues can be blocked when you aren’t taking care of or honoring your body in all the ways it needs. Here are a few areas to do some reflection about and ensure that you are getting what you need

• Sleep: The amount of sleep you personally need can differ from the person next to you so perhaps you don’t need to focus on a number and instead focus on how you feel. Do you feel tired during the day? Do you have a hard time falling asleep at night? If you notice anything coming up around sleep, check in with a doctor/therapist/other provider and get the help you need to catch those Zs.

• Down Time: This could mean taking a vacation or ensuring you take a lunch break at work. We live in a capitalistic society that tells us we must go go go all the time and that can run us into the ground. Make sure you are getting what you need, and if you aren’t, come up with a plan that meets those needs.

• Thoughts/Feelings: Do you take time to honor or process the thoughts or feelings that you have throughout your day/week? Are you constantly pushing thoughts down in the hopes they will magically disappear? Many of us do not function well when we are not taking care of our emotional health, but often are so busy we pay little attention. Get help if you need from a professional, or lean into your friends/family/partner, etc, for support if needed

• Relationships: Humans are social creatures, and for the majority of us that means that we need to have social contact to feel balanced in our lives (there are of course people who need less of this so check in with what YOU need). Do you have relationships that are meaningful to you? Do you have enough connection in your life? If not its ok! This might mean coming up with some creative ways to connect, which with our new-ish virtual world has brought some interesting ways to do this.

5. Mindfulness

I don’t think that anything is a “catch-all” in terms of what we should be engaging in, but in my experience most of us could benefit from some additional mindfulness in our lives. To clarify, mindfulness in its simplest form is being present in the here and now without judgment.  If you love things like meditation then that’s great! But it is not the only way to be mindful. Try this - set a timer for 1 minute and turn off all distractions. You can close your eyes or leave them open, but sit up straight in your chair and wiggle some parts of your body while also paying attention to your thoughts. That’s it! You’ve been mindful for a minute. From there, you can experiment with mindfulness in all sorts of ways throughout your day. Remember that all you need to do is be present in the moment (without judgment) and notice what is going on both inside and around you. This gets easier with practice! Practicing mindfulness can help you better understand what you are feeling in your body, such as hunger fullness cues.

6. Be thoughtful about what type of hunger you are experiencing

There are 3 different types of hunger - Taste hunger (when something “sounds good”), Practical/Physical Hunger (when our body has an energy need), and Emotional Hunger (an emotional need that could be met via eating). It can be important to distinguish between these types of hunger as it can help guide us towards what we would like to do in that situation. Here are some examples of how to help the type of hunger guide you:

• Taste Hunger: check in with yourself about what is sounding good in that moment. Do you want something salty? Something sweet? Does it sound better to have something smooth or crunchy? If you have access, try to really meet this hunger with what you are craving/desiring.

• Practical/Physical Hunger: Are you starting to feel the beginnings of physical hunger and need to plan ahead due to the timing of your day? Check in with what your level of hunger is (use that hunger fullness scale) and try to match your meal or snack with your hunger level

• Emotional Hunger: First, remember that there is nothing wrong with emotional eating (check out my past blog post about this). Food can be joy and comfort and love and that is to be celebrated. It can be helpful to notice when you are eating for emotional reasons so that you can tune in with what is going on underneath and understand if you need more support around something. We can absolutely use food as a tool to cope, and we can also make sure that we have a nice big toolbox full of lots of options to use when we need it. 

Are you ready to start honoring your hunger? If so you are well on your way to honing your skills as an intuitive eater. This is a friendly reminder that, yes, these are skills that you need to develop and they take work, especially after the years you have likely spent being told that you can not trust yourself around food. Make sure to grab my free hunger fullness scale below to help you on your way to honing in on those cues! Also know that it is ok to not go this alone if you need additional support. As a Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor, I would love to work with you 1:1 or in a group setting to help you embrace the intuitive eater I know you can be.

Embracing Intuitive Eating - 5 Ways to Reject the Diet Mentality

“Throw out the diet books and magazine articles that offer you the false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently. Get angry at diet culture that promotes weight loss and the lies that have led you to feel as if you were a failure every time a new diet stopped working and you gained back all of the weight. If you allow even one small hope to linger that a new and better diet or food plan might be lurking around the corner, it will prevent you from being free to rediscover Intuitive Eating.”

— Intuitive Eating, 4th Edition, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch

Welcome to my Intuitive Eating series, where I am breaking down each of the ten principles of Intuitive Eating and giving real life tips and examples on how to put them into practice. If you got here from my original post on Intuitive Eating, you already read about Principle 1 - Rejecting the Diet Mentality. You may have seen this term being thrown around and are not quite sure what it means. Figuring out how to stop dieting might make it hard to jump into intuitive eating, so let’s talk about it!

So, what exactly is the diet mentality?

Diet mentality is the belief that dieting is the key to health and happiness, and that if we can be successful at dieting, our life will then be full of unicorns, magic, and feeling AMAZING about ourselves. It makes us feel that we absolutely, under no circumstances, can trust our own internal hunger and fullness cues and that, instead, we need to follow a diet plan that will give us the *exact* amount of food and exercise that we need to live our best lives.

Signs you might be stuck in the diet mentality:

• You follow a specific diet plan which tells you the where, when, and how of what to eat. This could look like counting calories, macros, or eliminating certain food groups

• You exercise to burn calories, even at the expense of an injured, tired, or “just not into it” body

• You don’t allow yourself to eat certain foods even though you truly enjoy them

• You are constantly on the search for your next diet, and often have “cheat days” or the “I’m starting my diet on Monday so I can eat whatever I want today” mentality

• You are often seen reading the latest health and wellness book that centers specifically around what foods to eat (and not eat) and the “best way to exercise” 

• You judge your food choices based on what those around you are eating 

• You categorize your day as “good” or “bad” based on your food and movement

Does any of this sound familiar to you? Now I want to be perfectly clear that if you see yourself in any of the above - it is not your fault. We live in a diet culture obsessed society that has likely been telling you since you were a tiny kiddo that being fat = bad and that you must be thin in order to live a healthy and happy life. AND in order to live in that thin body you must be on a diet and monitoring every bite that goes into your mouth. Sound like something you have heard before? I encourage you to take a moment to reflect upon the messages that you have received around bodies up until this point and just how insidious the role that diet culture plays in your life is. The first step in learning how to stop dieting is thinking about how you ended up here.

So why is the first Principle of Intuitive Eating focused on rejecting the diet mentality?

Recognizing how the diet mentality and diet culture have inundated your life and figuring out how to move past this is the key to being able to fully embrace intuitive eating. The goal of being an intuitive eater is to be IN your body, feeling all of the sensations and information that it gives you, so that you can make the choices for you. If we are stuck in the diet mentality, we are staying OUT of our body and using external rules to guide the way in which we nourish and treat ourseles. The only way to get back in our body is to let go of that control (easier said than done, I know) and start listening.

A few notes…

This could be the point in this post where I tell you about all of the ways in which dieting itself hurts your physical and mental health. We could talk about how dieting leads to weight gain (95% of dieters will gain back the weight they lost over a few years, and many of those dieters will end up gaining MORE weight than where they started), how weight cycling (the subsequent losing and gaining of weight that most dieters experience) can have an extremely negative effect on your body, or how the constant focus on shrinking your body or obsessing over your health can have a serious effect on your mental well-being. I am neither a researcher nor a doctor, but I have consulted with and read about the effects I listed above and have full faith in the amazing people who are doing this work to look into the negative effects dieting can have on our bodies and minds. There are many places on the internet that you can find and read these studies and I’m happy to share them with you if you want to reach out. My hope here is to provide you with some hands on ways to get started on this journey.

5 Ways to begin to Reject the Diet Mentality

1. Reflect upon your dieting history

   In order to move forward, we often need to look back at where we’ve been. You had a lot of very valid reasons for dieting and investing in diet culture, and those reasons won’t simply vanish without some real reflection.

   Some questions to ask yourself:

   • How many diets have you been on throughout your  life? Try to make an extensive list - this can include anything from trying to “eat healthier” to calorie or macro counting, an exercise “plan,” or a specific diet. Be honest with yourself and write it all down

   • Did these plans or ideas give you the results you wanted? If yes - did these results last? Was that something you  could keep up for the rest of your life? Were there downsides?

   • How did you feel while you were dieting? Were there any negative mental or physical effects?

   • What happened at the end of the diet? Did you feel a sense of shame or guilt over it “not working”? Did you blame yourself that you “didn’t work hard enough?” What was the impact of this on your mental health?

2. Take note of how much time you have spent engaging in dieting behaviors

   Look back at what you wrote above and ask yourself the question - how much time and energy did I put into dieting? It might be surprising to really picture how much time was spent planning (and perhaps worrying about) the diet that you were on. Did it monopolize your life? Did it take up brain space or make it difficult to focus on the things that were important?

   If you learned how to stop dieting, what might you have time for instead? You might not know the answer to how you would like to be spending your time, especially when you have spent so much time “playing by the rules” of diet culture. Take the pressure off of yourself! For now, simply reflect on the fact that diet culture has stolen precious time from you and stay curious about what your life could look like without it. 

3. Picture what you have been avoiding in your life due to the impact of dieting

   The next step is to think about what you might be avoiding in your life and what you might be waiting to do until you “reach your goal” of being in a smaller body. Have you avoided applying for the job that you really want? Turned down an offer for a date? Said no to social events with family and friends? What have you stopped yourself from doing, waiting until you reached your goal?

   Diet culture keeps us in a never-ending loop . What could it feel like if you reject the diet mentality and embrace your life now, in the body you are currently in? What might you be do that you have been putting on hold until your body reached a certain goal?

4. Imagine what it feels might be easier for you if you were in a smaller body

   Take a moment to think about what you feel weight loss might bring you and how you imagine it would make your life better. Is the appeal of weight loss truly about being in a different body or is it about what that body feels it would give you?

   Perhaps you imagine that being in a smaller body would give you more confidence and allow you to do the things you always wanted. Maybe the idea of being in a smaller body makes you feel that you would have more energy or that your joints would hurt less. Write down what feels true for you! Next - think about what you might do with that newly found confidence or energy - how might you care for yourself differently? Would you buy some new clothes to make you feel your best or bring some movement back into your life? How might it feel to do those things NOW instead of waiting for your body to change? How might things feel different in your day to day?

5. Look for the sneaky ways diet culture has made its way into your life

   Diet culture is a sneaky little devil. You might have an easy time recognizing it in things like weight loss plans, but what about all of the other ways it might show up in your life? For example, are you letting dieting or calorie/macro counting apps stick around on your phone “just in case” you need them? Do you have diet or “wellness” books hanging around on your bookshelf, staring you in the face every day? Getting rid of your diet crutches (sneaky or otherwise) is a great way to reject the diet mentality. Also remember that “lifestyle” changes such as cutting out certain foods or forcing yourself to do a specific workout class (even if you don’t like it) can be sneaky diet culture in disguise.

So what do you think? Are you ready to start to reject the diet mentality and lean into intuitive eating? What steps above can you implement to help you take the leap? Recognizing the diet mentality and calling out diet culture is only the first principle of intuitive eating, but a really important one that cannot be passed by or rushed through. Give yourself space and compassion to recognize where the diet mentality is showing up in your life and how to call it out when you see it. And as always, get some extra support if you don’t want to go it alone.

The 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating That Will Help You Ditch Your Diet

So What Exactly is Intuitive Eating?

My guess is that you have heard of Intuitive Eating as it has become quite the buzzword. You may have heard about it on social media and become more confused when the influencer talking about it made it seem like another diet plan. Much in the way that the body positivity movement got co-opted by small-bodied white folx, Intuitive Eating has suffered some of the same fate. You might hear well-intentioned influencers talking about Intuitive Eating in the sense that you can simply “eat when hungry and stop when full,” all the way to giant diet companies (that I will not name here) trying to confuse you by saying things like “there are no good/bad foods!” while simultaneously making you track every calorie that you eat. These companies profess that they “aren’t a diet plan” while literally making you….diet. Yea, I know that this seems really freaking confusing. The good news is that Intuitive Eating, written by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, is a framework that encourages you to ditch all that BS and embrace your body’s own wisdom. 

Why Intuitive Eating is the Opposite of Dieting

The 10 principles of Intuitive Eating are in no way another diet plan trying to trick you into submission. It is an empowerment tool - not a plan for exactly how to eat or not eat, and most certainly not a “hunger/fullness” diet as many think it is. What I mean by empowerment is helping give you the tools you need to figure out what works for your body, what foods you like and don’t like, how to ensure you are getting what you need, and more. This is much the opposite of a diet plan. When we go on a diet, we are choosing some sort of plan that tells us exactly what we need, whether that is what time of day to eat, how much to eat (or not eat), and all of this with the intent of changing our body in some way. Intuitive Eating takes the opposite approach - that no one except you knows what’s best for your individual and unique body. 

The truth is that we are all born intuitive eaters. As children, most of us were able to self-regulate and ensure that we ate when we needed food and/or when it was enjoyable, and over time were able to get all of the nutrients we needed without giving it any scientific thought. Fast forward a bit, and we were all eventually inundated with diet culture messaging about what foods were “good,” which ones were “bad,” convincing us that we actually had no idea how to nourish ourselves and needed someone else to give us an exact blueprint on how to do that. Do we really think the human race would have survived if we had no internal barometer for figuring out what we needed to eat?

How Intuitive Eating Can Help You Heal From Diet Culture

If you are looking to heal from diet culture, the 10 principles of intuitive eating can be a great tool in your toolbox. Although I don’t think it is a stand alone “answer” it can help you start to take back some of what dieting steals from us. Diet culture tells us that we should not trust our body and that we need another diet or plan to tell us exactly what we need. Diet culture not only leads to disordered eating patterns and body image distress, but it can also make us question our own self-worth. When we are made to believe that the most interesting thing about us is the size of our body and the way that it looks, it reinforces the harmful narratives about bodies that are considered “other” and can make us question our place in this world.

Why Intuitive Eating Works and Where to Start

Intuitive eating works and is backed by a multitude of studies and research that shows that it has a positive impact. It is important though to note what your definition of “working” is. If you are measuring this by if you are going to lose weight, then intuitive eating likely won’t feel like it “works” for you. The truth is that we have no idea what your body is going to do while moving towards becoming an intuitive eater. You may lost weight, gain weight, or stay the same. If you are coming out of a period of restriction (which most people who are dieting are), your body will likely gain weight which is expected and necessary. 

If you are struggling with deciding if you are ready to give up dieting for the 10 principles of intuitive eating (which is 100% your choice, no judgment here), try taking an inventory of all the diets that you have tried in the past. Did they work in the long term for you? Even if your body did change, was it sustainable? Did it take away all of your body image struggles? If the answer to any of these were “no,” then perhaps you are ready to give something else a try.

The 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating and How to Make Them Work in the Real World

1. Reject the Diet Mentality

As I talked about above, embracing intuitive eating requires a huge shift. It means rejecting the idea that a diet plan knows more about your body then you do. It means getting angry at diet culture for telling you this lie and for making you feel like you didn’t have a choice. The good news is that this is a process and you cannot expect yourself to read this paragraph and have changed your mind. This takes a massive amount of unlearning past stuff and embracing the new. For many folx it can be helpful to find in-person or online community that is talking about the harm that diet culture has caused and what to do about it. Some of my favorite books to start unlearning are Reclaiming Body Trust and The Body is Not an Apology.

2. Honor Your Hunger

When was the last time you actually paid attention to your hunger and fullness cues? Do you even know what they feel like? These cues can be really different for each person - for example when I start to get hungry it doesn’t always feel like a “rumbling stomach,” but instead manifests as light-headedness or a bit of irritability. For this step I would recommend worrying less about stopping eating when you feel full and instead being more curious about what it feels for you when you are satisfied. Also remember that it is OK to keep eating past fullness!! This is where people get it twisted - if you want to keep eating past your fullness (for whatever reason), it is perfectly okay to make that choice. But this is the key - it is honing in on your ability to make the choice vs someone else making it for you, or feeling like there is a “should” and “should not.”

3. Make Peace with Food

I get it - this one might feel tough. But yes, you read it right! The goal here is to make peace with all foods. Ditch the idea that there is “good” or “bad” or foods you “should” or “shouldn’t” have. Your aim here is to completely neutralize foods so that food is just….food. When we restrict ourselves from certain foods we tend to have a more difficult time tuning in with what we really want and need. This could look like stocking up on foods you typically “don’t allow” in your home, or truly being open to ordering whatever it is that you are craving off a restaurant menu.

4. Challenge the Food Police

We know that making peace with food might bring about a lot of negative thoughts and rules that you are breaking. This is normal and to be expected. You are not good or bad for eating or not eating certain foods. Unless you punched an innocent kid in the face and stole a cookie out of their hand, then you have not done anything wrong by eating that cookie (insert whatever food you feel “bad” about here!). Most (if not all) of these food police thoughts in your head are food rules that diet culture has placed there. You may not even be hearing your own voice - it might be a parent, teacher, or celebrity that you hear, echoing some sentiment they have said in the past or present. Just because we were taught a “rule” does not make it right or one we need to follow.

5. Discover the Satisfaction Factor

Can you remember the last time you actually enjoyed a meal? Or have you been trying to get through it as quickly as possible or found no enjoyment because it wasn’t what you actually wanted? Food is love and pleasure and fun. This doesn’t mean that every eating experience has to be an enjoyable one, but it is important to show yourself that food CAN be enjoyable. Try this out - the next time you are ready for a meal (and have the time and space to do this), ask yourself what you truly want to eat. Easier said than done, I know, when you may have not asked yourself this question in a long time. There is so much more to this principle (more to come in a future post!) but this can be an interesting place to start.

6. Feel Your Fullness

When you have been eating by a prescriptive diet, fullness isn’t even taken into account. The truth is that everyone needs a different amount of food in any given meal or snack - and you may need different amounts from day to day. So how do we deal with this? We listen to our body for signs of fullness and satisfaction and eat accordingly. Now here’s a super important caveat to note - this does NOT mean that you MUST stop eating when you are full. You may be at an amazing restaurant and loving the meal you are having, or you just simply want more of what you are eating. Intuitive eating is about making the choice whether or not to stop based on all the facts - there are times you will eat past fullness on purpose and that is ok.

7. Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness

Hunger and fullness are both physical sensations and emotional ones. We can feel physically OR emotionally full, for example, and it can be important to be able to be in tune with our emotions when it comes to truly being aware of what we need in any given moment. Mindfulness is a great way to approach this! Now I don’t mean needing to stop and do meditation in the middle of lunch (unless you want to). At it’s core, mindfulness means being aware of the present moment (and all of the thoughts and feelings that come along with it) without judgment. A great first place to start is to simply notice what thoughts and feelings you have around food and meals. There is nothing else to do right now except notice and be aware of your feelings with kindness and compassion.

8. Respect Your Body

Many folx end up having a negative reaction to the idea of body positivity, and for good reason. If you are feeling negative about your body, it can feel literally impossible to get to a place of feeling like you love your body. Instead, what if we approach our body with respect and kindness? Bodies come in all shapes and sizes - would you feel negatively about someone because of their height? Weight and shape are mostly genetic in the same way as height, yet we would never blame ourselves or feel morally inadequate for how tall we are. Work on accepting your body for what it is (and note that acceptance does not have to mean love or that you are “super happy about it”) and see how that lands.

9. Movement - Feel the Difference

Ditch the idea about exercising for weight loss or that it is something you are required to do. Start to make a shift around the idea that you are allowed to do joyful movement wherever, whenever, and however you please. Yes, we all know that moving our bodies and has many benefits. It also can impact us negatively if we aren’t listening to our body or if it is a way to keep us stuck in diet culture. Put aside the idea that you need to exercise and try to imagine what would feel good to you. Maybe that means taking a walk, riding your bike, or taking a break from “exercise” entirely while you heal. Yes - deciding to take a break from movement is allowed if that is what you need! There are no rules here - see a pattern?

10. Honor Your Health - Gentle Nutrition

It is no coincidence that there is no talk at all about nutrition until this last principle. Also please note that for *most* people, it takes quite some time to get to that step. If we start to focus on nutrition too soon, it just becomes another rule or diet and will not allow us to truly listen into our body first. When you are ready for this step, it involves making choices around food that make you feel good. It can also mean eating something you know won’t make you feel your best because you truly want it and are making that choice!

So how does it feel reading about the ten principles of Intuitive Eating? My guess it that it might sound like a great idea in theory but also feels overwhelming. We have been taught for so long that we cannot trust our bodies or our hunger so it is completely normal to question this massive change. I also know that you read this post because you were interested in a different way of living - maybe you are looking to break free of diet culture or disordered eating, or want to get to a place of respecting your body. The good news is that this is a process and you can take as long as you need. Stay tuned for more posts breaking down each principle further and for learning more tips for how to move towards being a more intuitive eater. You also 100% deserve and are worthy of additional support if you are ready to take the leap and don’t want to do it alone. As a Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor and therapist in FL, I would love to walk alongside you and help guide you on the path to food and body liberation. Click the button below to connect!

Why We Worry About Emotional Eating & What to Do About It

Emotional eating is a hot topic these days. You likely see professionals and other influencers talking about “how to stop emotional eating,” which continues to enforce that idea that this is a problem area in most of our lives. But is it? When did we decide that emotional eating was an issue? And if it is, what do we do about it, and why does emotional eating happen?

Why are we so scared of emotional eating? 

Ever wonder why we are so scared of the idea of emotional eating? Well here’s my hot take: it’s mainly due to the influence of diet culture.

Diet culture tells us that we should have ultimate control over what goes in our bodies. It says to think about food as “fuel” and nothing more - and that having this ultimate control will get us an A+ grade. Diet culture says that if we think about food as pleasure, we have failed and have done something horribly wrong. If we play out the tape and think about why we are SO scared of emotional eating, most of the time it leads to a fear of weight gain. Many of us have spent so much of our lives fighting against our body and trying to control its size (and our health), and that makes the thought of losing control over this is terrifying at best.

Consider this scenario - you have been on diets for the majority of your life, being told that you must control each morsel that enters your mouth. You have also been told that you cannot trust yourself and your cravings and must follow a plan. You are even taught not to trust your own internal hunger cues, instead being told you “might be thirsty” or “can’t be hungry, you just ate!” Now imagine feeling like your emotions “took over” and you dove headfirst into your favorite snack or dessert. Of course you will feel judgment and shame - you have been told this is the opposite of what you are “supposed” to do! You feel like a failure. But are you?

Who said emotional eating is wrong

Think back to when you first started learning about food and how to eat. You may have had well-intentioned parents who told you that certain foods were “good” or “bad,” and dictated when and where you were able to eat. You may have had a health class in school which spoke to you about nutrition and put fear in you about those choices. You watch shows day in and day out that talk about the horrors of not being in a small body (and shame those that live in larger bodies), and social media is more of the same. You might hear professionals with important-sounding degrees and certifications saying the same things - that you should be fueling your body a specific way, and that deviating from that is just plain wrong (and *gasp* even dangerous).

Unfortunately, many of the food and “health” advice we receive these days is heavily steeped in diet culture and fatphobia. Diet culture tells us that a small body is the only “good” body and we should spend all of our extra time pursuing a goal that will bring us closer to that point. It also tells us that there is a right and wrong way to eat. Diet culture will say that we should “only be eating when hungry” and that emotional eating is a behavior to be dealt with. Fatphobia makes us believe that being in a larger body is a moral failing, and that the size of our body is 100% within our control. It tells us that our worth and value are wrapped up in our ability to assert this control, and that fat bodies are just plain wrong.

So why does emotional eating happen? (and is it emotional eating?)

There are so many reasons why someone might eat for emotional reasons. When you google the definition of emotional eating, you will see information pointing to “over-eating” and ways that it can “derail weight loss efforts.” What do these point to? You guessed it - fear of weight gain. The bigger question is - “over” what amount? Who decides how much food is the right amount of any given person in any given situation? The logic here is flawed, and continues to perpetuate a fear of bodies not staying small.

Think about the last fun event you went to - there was probably good food, friends or family, and a carefree attitude. At this event you may have been served food, or visited a buffet, and enjoyed your eating experience. But would you classify this as emotional eating? My guess is no, that you would not classify this type of experience (which you likely identify as when you felt positive emotions) to emotional eating for “negative” reasons. But is it truly any different? You may not have been hungry at the event but you likely ate anyways, because you wanted to savor the social experience.

So then when we talk about emotional eating, we are really likely referring to “eating when experiencing negative emotions.” Again, I implore you to think about what feels negative about this type of experience. Is it because you are focusing on eating a certain way such as only eating specific types or amounts of foods? Do you tend to feel guilt and shame in these instances and like you have done something wrong? What would happen if we brought some curiosity to the experience of emotional eating to see what is truly going on?

What To Do if You Worry You Are Emotionally Eating - 4 Tips

1. Is it really emotional eating or are you…

Let’s say that you catch yourself having a food experience that feels a lot like emotional eating. Or - you might be reflecting on an experience that you had that felt very emotional. Take a look at what your relationship with food currently is. Do you allow yourself to have the foods you want? Are you controlling your intake in any way? When was the last time you ate a meal or a snack? Sometimes, we can feel out of control or uncomfortable when we are doing something that might feel out of the ordinary for our day to day.

Ask yourself the question - is it really emotional eating or are you: hungry, restricting, or trying to control your intake? Perhaps you have been restricting in some way (no judgment!) and your body has had enough. Remember - restriction does not only mean eating “less calories,” it can also mean cutting out food groups or types of food, or not allowing yourself to have the amount that you truly desire. You can also ask yourself if you just happen to be hungry at a time that does not feel convenient to you. Hunger cues are also not always the straightforward grumbling in the tummy - it can be a sensation in your throat, lightheadedness, low energy, or some other way your body is trying to grab your attention (anywhere from subtle to not so subtle).

2. So it is emotional eating, now what?

Let’s say that you have asked yourself all those questions above and you feel that it truly is emotional eating. Now what? How do you stop emotional eating? First of all, get comfortable with the idea that there is nothing wrong with using food to cope. Food is joy and comfort and sometimes a friend when we need it. Life can be hard! Sometimes things just suck and we need our favorite comfort food to remind us of better times or bring us a little joy when things feel bleak. Remind yourself that there is nothing inherently wrong with eating for emotional reasons, and that the only reason you have been taught that it is wrong is because of nasty diet culture (which you are trying to divest from!).

Although I don’t think there is anything wrong with eating for comfort, it is nice to know that we have a plethora of coping skills in our toolkit. The key here is tuning in to what you truly need in this situation. Are you longing for connection? Maybe this is a good time to reach out to a friend or someone in your life who is supportive and can help you process whatever is going on.

Are you trying to soothe some negative feelings after a tough day? Maybe it would help to listen to some music or watch a favorite tv show while you are noshing on your favorite snack. Perhaps you are feeling overwhelmed and are looking to ground yourself. Maybe some meditation or other mindful technique can help you come back to center. Side note that I am 100% NOT saying that you can’t also eat during these times, but we might want to layer on some other strategies that can help us.

3. Ditch the judgment

I know, I know, I talk about this a lot! I can’t help myself - we are chronically judging and shaming ourselves literally for just existing! We are our worst critic and it truly is not helpful or a good representation of the truth. If you already have a negative connotation about emotional eating, it is likely that you are going to give yourself a really hard time if it happens. If the idea of emotional eating makes your heart race, really take a moment to think about where this messaging came from. Who told you that there was something wrong with eating in this way? Where did this narrative come from? 

Sometimes, half the battle of dealing with things that makes us uncomfortable is figuring out why we are feeling discomfort in the first place. If we are then judging ourselves on top of that, it can be a recipe for disaster. The next time you find yourself in a judgmental or critical place, see what would happen if you gave yourself some compassion and did not add more stress on top of an already stressful situation. Remind yourself that the underlying narrative around emotional eating is coming from an external place, and one that is not looking out for your best interest. Plus - trying to figure out how to stop yourself from emotional eating might actually lead to, you guessed it, more emotional eating (because eating is emotional!).

4. Consider exploring your relationship with food 

How would you classify your relationship with food? Is it stressed out and wrapped up in diet culture and wanting to change your body?  Do you truly give yourself permission to eat what you want? For many of us, we grew up being told that our internal instincts about food were wrong. We were taught to not trust our bodies to tell us what we needed when, and to follow some external rules about the when/where/how of eating. What this did was leave a generation (or many) questioning every interaction with food that they have. We wonder if we ate too much, not enough, not the right thing, etc, etc. Could this be part of the reason why emotional eating happens for you?

I cannot tell you the amount of people who come into my therapy office who feel like they are completely out of touch with their needs and are continuously questioning their food choices. If this sounds familiar, please show yourself some of that compassion we talked about - this stuff is not easy and there is nothing wrong with you! The bottom line is that if your relationship with food is not in a great place, it can be hard to really tune into what is going on underneath all the noise.

If you are struggling with your relationship with food, consider getting some help from a professional or starting to do some research or reading to dive into this work. I would recommend starting with one of the following books: Intuitive Eating, The Body is Not an Apology, or Body Trust.

If you are looking for a therapist in FL, I am currently accepting new clients! Reach out to connect, or check out my free resources on my blog or social media.

4 Ways to Stop Self-Criticism - How to Stop Judging Yourself

Why do we judge ourselves so harshly?

How often do you find yourself thinking critical, judgmental thoughts about yourself or others? Do you ever wonder how to stop judging yourself? Whether it is about our bodies, level of productivity, or decision making ability, many of us spend countless hours each day putting ourselves (and others) down. Many times these are subconscious thoughts that pass by as quickly as they came - but there are other times where we hear them loud and clear, and they can have a pretty harsh effect on our emotions.

So why do we judge ourselves so harshly? The hard truth is that we live in a culture that clearly defines things as “good” and “bad,” without a lot of gray area. For example, as adults we are expected to work certain types of jobs and make a certain amount of money to be considered “productive.” We are also expected to do very specific things to be considered “good” parents to our kids, children to our own parents, partners to whomever we have chosen to live our lives with, and community members.  So, it’s no surprise that when we deviate from these social norms, we judge ourselves. We judge ourselves for not being “good enough,” and feel that we have not been “living up to” these standards set out for us. 

*Ask yourself - who decided for me that there was a “right” and “wrong” way to live? Did I set these standards or were they passed down to me?

How to Stop Judging Yourself

So, you’ve noticed that you judge yourself and that it impacts you negatively - now what? I wish that there was an easy, surface-level answer that would tell you exactly how to not judge yourself (believe me, I do), but this will require going a bit deeper. Don’t freak out! It’s not as complicated as you might think, it just takes a little bit of listening.

Self-criticism and judgmental thoughts rarely come “out of nowhere.” What I mean by that is that these thoughts are typically coming from deeper down. They often come from parts of us that carry deep feelings such as shame, embarrassment, and other pain. I believe that there are a few things we can do to help us figure out where these judgmental thoughts are coming from.

4 ways to stop self-criticism

Catch the judgmental thoughts

One of the first steps to stop self-criticism is to recognize when it is actually happening.  Be careful of not judging yourself for not realizing that you are being critical! We don’t need that - we just need a willingness to start paying attention to when judgmental/critical thoughts are popping up. Take the pressure off of yourself of needing to figure out what to do once you catch the thoughts, and focus on just noticing.

Start by thinking about the times in your life where you may notice you have critical thoughts - maybe around your job, parenting, or your body (as a few examples). Start to pay attention to the patterns you are noticing when it comes to these judgmental thoughts, and where they are coming up. This first step is crucial to explore more about how to stop judging yourself.

Connect with the parts that are coming up

Next - stop labeling these thoughts as negative and instead get really curious. Try asking questions like - what is going on here? Why am I having this thought right now? Is there something that is important for me to know? If it feels safe to do so, close your eyes and take a deep breath, and focus on what you are feeling within your body and/or any thoughts that are coming up. 

Do this without judgment or trying to rationalize why you may or may not be feeling this way - truly just listen in. If you start to get any more information, just hear it for what it is and don’t try to push the information away. Connecting with the parts carrying these negative beliefs are a crucial step in the process of how to stop judging yourself.

Get curious about where these thoughts are coming from

Once you can really tease out what some of the judgmental thoughts are, you might be ready to dig into what the underlying narratives are that cause these thoughts to be present. Sometimes, when it comes to negative thoughts, there are parts of us that are trying to tell us a story. Perhaps you were bullied for something about your body when you were growing up and now think harsh and critical thoughts about yourself when you look in the mirror. Maybe a well-intentioned family member made a comment about your parenting and now you judge yourself when you make certain parenting decisions.

Think of negative thoughts/beliefs as the surface level issue, and the stories/narratives underneath as the bedrock that holds up those thoughts. If we just try to modify the actual thoughts, we aren’t really getting at the stuff underneath. In order to truly start to heal from these judgmental thoughts, we need to get deep into the dirt, and unearth the stories that lie beneath. This is a way to bring us more long-term relief as you figure out how to stop judging yourself.

Once you have identified the critical part and notice that there is more to the story, continue to check in and ask the important questions. What is this part worried about? Does it feel that something might happen if you didn’t criticize yourself in this way? It can also be helpful to check in about what else that part of you might want to know. Try this - once you recognize a negative thought, close your eyes and tune in with the thought (or maybe a physical symptom you are feeling in your body). Once you do, send some curiosity to that thought, and ask it (either out loud or internally) “what else do you want me to know?” Sometimes these negative thoughts come up because there are parts of us that want to be heard, and they will get louder if we don’t give them that space.

Process these thoughts

Once you have noticed, checked in with, and flushed out the judgmental thoughts, you might have been able to get in touch with parts of you carrying very specific stories. So now what? Well - this is the beginning of the work! If you have become aware of an underlying narrative or belief, you might want to try journaling to record your thoughts, or talk with a trusted friend or other support so that you can continue to process what you have learned.  Sometimes this can feel hard, and that is also ok. You may have touched upon trauma from your past, and there might be a hurt part of you that needs more help and support.

It’s ok if you feel like you need additional help. It might mean reaching out a professional who can help guide you through exploring where these critical thoughts might be coming from. You are not alone in figuring out how to stop judging yourself, and you deserve to get professional guidance if needed.

If the above resonates, you might benefit from seeing a therapist who practices from an IFS (Internal Family Systems) framework, which can help you get in touch with your multiple parts (this is normal, I promise!) and the stories that they carry. If you are looking for a therapist in Florida, I am happy to help! Don’t hesitate to reach out to connect.

If you are a FL resident, you can click the button below to connect with a professional to talk more about how to stop judging yourself - you deserve more!

Tips on Why and How to Stop Dieting and Change Your Life

When you read the title of this post, what was your initial reaction? Did you feel nervous, thinking that there was no way you could stop dieting? Did you feel relief to hear someone encouraging it? Did you stop to think about the last (or current) diet that you were on? Talking about dieting in our society has become so normalized that you might think that it’s “impossible” to even think about NOT dieting! Talking about how to stop dieting might feel scary and that is ok (and honestly a pretty normal reaction).

Most of us were taught from a very young age that we could not trust our bodies to make choices about what to eat (or not eat).

Going on a diet was felt to be the best answer to this problem! We may have had well-intended adults who were either on diets of their own, or so concerned about their (or our) bodies and being accepted in this world that they felt this was the only option.

The funny part is that if you look up the word “diet” in the dictionary, it first lists the original definitions of  “food and drink regularly consumed,” and “habitual nourishment.” When did we turn the word diet into something meaning “a way of losing weight” or “how to manipulate our body?”

You might have been on a diet or two in your life and consider yourself a dieter. Chronic dieting, on the other hand, speaks to the act of being on diet after diet, possibly for months, years, or more. Many of us could easily fall into this category over our lifetime - trying every diet that came our way, and feeling desperate to “finally lose the weight.” If you are like 95% of others that have tried dieting, you have likely felt that you have “failed” and the weight just never quite came off (or came back over time).

If part of you is telling you that it’s time to get off the diet roller coaster, let’s address the why and how.

Scared to stop dieting?

The mere thought of stopping dieting might scare you so much it puts you into a tailspin. You may have been involved in chronic dieting for so long that you can’t even fathom how to eat normally (if such a thing exists). This might be causing a spike in anxiety and panic. I want you to take a deep breath and feel ok sitting in this suck. This is scary shit. It’s asking you to make an enormous shift and it’s ok to be scared.

You might be fearful of gaining weight or struggling to maintain the weight you are at. I’ve been there so I completely get it. You have potentially put in a huge amount of effort (both physically and mentally) into controlling your weight and you aren’t sure what will happen if you loosen the reins.

Here’s the honest (and sometimes not so easy to accept) truth - we don’t know what your body will do when you stop dieting. 

You may gain weight, your weight might stay the same, or you may lose weight. We can’t predict it, and that can be scary as hell. Again - if you are feeling like your life is currently controlled by dieting and you are ready to let go, it will be worth it, I promise. You also might want to prep yourself with some body image work - check out my post about 5 Tips to Be Comfortable With Your Body (at any size).

You might also simply be scared of having to figure out what to eat. You may feel so out of touch with your hunger and fullness cues that you feel anxiety about figuring out what your body needs. The truth is that this might be difficult at first! It will take some time to recover from chronic dieting, and we will talk about this again in a bit. The important thing here is knowing that there is a way to live your life without constant thoughts of dieting and trying to change your body.

Why should I stop dieting?

Just like when we started, I want you to ask yourself about how dieting has impacted your life. Perhaps you find yourself thinking about food 24/7. Maybe your life revolves around your next meal and worrying about how you will make sure you are “sticking to your plan.” How much space is your diet taking up in your brain? How much space is left for the other parts of your life?

If dieting is taking up a significant amount of brain power - think about what else you could be doing in its place. Imagine all the other aspects of your life you could be focusing on instead.

If you have tried to stop dieting before and felt like it “didn’t work” (ie you gained weight or went back to another diet), you might feel nervous about trying again. Be honest with yourself and take a look at what happened afterwards. Did you just quit “cold turkey” and without a plan for how to move forward? Did you gain weight and viewed that as negative and like you were “doing the wrong thing?” Undoing your internal bias about weight is a whole other topic (with way too much information to include here!), but know that your thoughts about weight and your body have been shaped by a fatphobic society that tells us that larger bodies are not inherently worthy. It’s ok to sit in this feeling too, and know that it is normal and valid.

How to Stop Dieting 

The first step is recognizing that you are, in fact, on a diet. This could mean a mainstream “diet plan” (think Keto, Weight Watchers, etc.), anything that has you counting “macros” or food groups, or any kind of food rules that you have in place. Yes, even that “lifestyle change” might be a diet.

Any time that you are manipulating what you are eating (outside of needing to do it for a medical condition), especially if you are trying to physically change your body in some way, you are on a diet.

Be honest with yourself - and no judgment here!

Once you have come to the realization that you are, or have been on a diet, please have some compassion for yourself. We don’t want to all of the sudden shift to placing blame on ourselves or anyone else for dieting behavior (we are learning to be anti-diet, not anti-dieter). You might all of the sudden feel like you don’t know what to do or what to eat! A great starting place is reading about intuitive eating and beginning to implement some of those principles. As an intuitive eating counselor and therapist in Tampa, I recommend clients start to focus on “what sounds good” and trying to get back in touch with their hunger and fullness cues.

This is not a quick or easy process! Trust that you can get back in touch with your body’s cues, it will just take time. See what happens if you allow yourself to eat what you are craving - even if it feels like you are eating more than usual, or eating things that you haven’t had in a while. Seeing a therapist or intuitive eating coach can be really helpful for this if you feel like it is a struggle to do it on your own. 

How to recover from dieting

Once you make the decision to stop dieting, you might wonder “what now?” As I said above, trying to work towards intuitive eating can be a great first step. One of the important things to remember about intuitive eating is that focusing on “nutrition” is the last step in the process. This is for a reason - if we start to focus on this first, we miss all the steps in between about how to get in touch with what our body wants, and can turn intuitive eating into its own kind of “diet.” 

Getting support while you go through this transition can be so important. For many of us, this shit is hard on our own! Like I said - working with a therapist who has experience with chronic dieting, disordered eating, or eating disorders can be a great first step. Support can also come in the form of groups, connecting with friends who have been or are going through this process, or finding an online community where others are talking about their struggles.

Learning how to stop dieting may not feel easy, but I can promise you that it’s worth it. Knowing that it’s a big deal to make this shift (especially in the society we live in) and being ready for the resistance and questions that might come up is your best bet for success. And remember there is no shame in taking your time un-dieting your life, and getting help if you need!

Interested in connecting with me to see if we would be a good fit to work together to help you stop dieting? Click the button below to connect with me!

How to Be Comfortable With Your Body - 5 Tips Towards Acceptance

Trying to figure out how to be comfortable with your body? The good news here is that  you aren’t alone. As a body image therapist, a common message that I hear is that you see body positive messages all over your social media, but they just aren’t hitting home. Mainstream media might tell you to “use positive affirmations” or “fake it until you make it,” but these ideas tend to fall short in the real world.

The first question you might be asking is - what actually is negative body image? Body image in general has become a bit of a catch-phrase, and we might be wondering what we actually mean when talking about it. Instead of giving you some text-book definition, I want you think about some questions that can give us some insight into how you are feeling towards your body. 

Think about:

• How much time are you spending thinking about your body during the day?

•  Is the way you think about your body stopping you from doing the things in life that you value?

• Do you find yourself constantly comparing your body to others?  

• Are you dieting or engaging in negative eating or exercise behaviors in an attempt to alter your body shape/size in some way?

What were your answers? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then it sounds like you might be struggling with your body image, or the way in which you view your body.  That doesn’t mean anything is wrong with you! It actually means that you are a human being functioning in a really shitty society that places worth on very specific body types. But I digress. Figuring out how to be comfortable with your body has nothing to do with what your body actually looks like - it has to do with how you feel towards your body.

So the question is, how do we start feeling more comfortable with our body?

1. How to be Comfortable With Your Body? Get Uncomfortable (yes that seems counterintuitive)

I wish that I could wave my magic wand and tell you the exact thing that is going to make you feel better.  Oh how I wish. But the reality is that this is fucking hard work. But, it IS 100% worth it. One of the most helpful things that I have found when starting to work on improving your body image is to recognize up front that it is going to be uncomfortable. Digging into this topic is like a winding road, with LOTS of pit stops, bumps, and eye-opening hurdles. I love Bri Campos, from Body Image with Bri’s, idea of looking at body image like an archaeological dig - knowing that there are many layers to discover.

Getting uncomfortable means knowing that it is not only OK, but completely normal to feel some discomfort when addressing body image. It is knowing that just because you are uncomfortable doesn’t mean you aren’t on the right track. Sometimes where we feel the most discomfort is the place we should start at. Figuring out how to be comfortable with your body includes being uncomfortable!

Before you get started, get to know what skills you have that help you cope when difficult emotions might arise. Maybe you love to listen to music to feel calm, take a bath, talk to a close friend or partner, or snuggle your favorite pet. Build up your skill list before you dive in, knowing that it is ok to lean on them when needed (and we all need them!).

2. Understand Why

Understanding why so many of us struggle with body image is important to explore. This can help give us some validation that we are not only NOT alone in these struggles, but that there are societal systems in place that directly lead to our own bodily discomfort. This topic alone needs a book (or many books) to relay all the important information, and many awesome ones are out there. Try checking out Your Body is Not an Apology or Fearing the Black Body as some great places to start. The fact that you are even asking the question of how to be comfortable in your own body is progress in itself!

The sad truth is that our society places some bodies on pedestals and views others as not valuable and unworthy. White, thin, cis, hetero bodies are praised as “good” and “right”, while fat, black, brown, and disabled bodies are considered less-than (and even dangerous). Diet culture has brainwashed us to believe that the way our body looks is completely within our control and never good enough. It tells us we should always be trying to be smaller, and that thinness=health (hot tip: it doesn’t). 

You don’t know how to be comfortable in your own body because you have been getting both subliminal and literally in-your-face messages throughout your life that you aren’t good enough. How can we expect to feel good about our bodies when society arounds us tells us otherwise? We are direct products of an ableist, racist, homophobic, anti-fat culture that screams at us that our bodies are literally bad.

3. Don’t start with body positivity

You might be thinking that the way to not feel negative about your body is to start thinking positively. Just change those thoughts to positive ones right?? Yea, not so easy.

Body positive messages don’t always cut it.

Try to imagine going from where you are feeling now all the way to feeling super positive about your body. Feel overwhelmed? Yea, me too. Don’t get me wrong - I think the idea of body positivity is a wonderful one. It’s just not always super realistic or even encouraging for those at the beginning of figuring this stuff out.

Instead of the overwhelming thought of being super positive about your body, or feeling like you need to “dive in” to more body positive messages, imagine what it might feel like to get to a more neutral and resilient space.  A space where your body exists, and you can ride the waves of positive and negative, landing somewhere in the middle. A place of potential appreciation or acknowledgment of what your body does for you.

If this feels hard (which it might and that’s also normal) try picking a part of your body that you don’t feel negative about. Focus on this part and try to come up with a neutral or factual statement about it.  For example - I don’t feel negative about my ears. They work well and do a pretty good job of hearing! This can be a great place to slowly start exploring how you feel about different parts of your body. Figuring out how to be comfortable in your own body can actually start with rejecting all sorts of negative body talk - even ones that are coming from inside.

4. Develop Body Image Resilience

Once you have settled into a place of understanding why we feel the ways we do about our body, and knowing that you don’t have to feel positively about your body to make progress, we can work towards building some body image resilience.

What do I mean by body image resilience? In my mind, this means being able to weather the body image storm and know that our body is a “good” body regardless of how we might feel about it. Even those of us who have done the hard work regarding our body image have bad body image days. This is normal and we can prepare ourselves for this. Having a better body image isn’t about not having negative thoughts - it’s about what we do with those thoughts when they arise.

One way to build up this resilience is to start to dive deeper into the narratives that keep us stuck in negative body image thoughts. What are the stories underneath the thoughts? For some of us, these thoughts can stem from earlier life experiences, traumas, or messages that have been drilled into us for long periods of time. Think back to times in your life when you were made to feel bad about your body. How might this have affected you?

These stories are real and valid. We all have them, and I have yet to find someone who has escaped these types of narratives.  I promise you that it’s more than just what your clothing size is - there is a narrative underneath that drives you to feel negatively about yourself.

5. Get Support Around Being Comfortable in Your Body

The purpose of this post was to simply give you a place to start when it comes to doing body image work. For some of you, this will be a great jumping off point to move towards a place of feeling more comfortable in your own body. For others, this won’t feel like enough! I get that and understand that you might be craving more.

I think it’s important to know what negative body image can lead to for some.  Some people might be experiencing minimal discomfort with their body, and simply reading about body image can help them move to a less negative space.  Others might be feeling such a high level of distress that it is impacting your day to day life. You might find yourself body checking, saying no to things you want to do in life because you feel uncomfortable in your skin, developing negative food habits, and more. 

If you are feeling a high level of distress because of your body image, please know that you are not alone and you deserve to get help. You do not need a “formal” diagnosis of any sort to deserve a space to talk through what you are feeling. Some things to look for in a provider would be someone who is fat-positive (or at the very least weight neutral), anti-diet, and aware of eating disorders/disordered eating. You can find a body image therapist in your area, join support groups, and more. Considering you asked the question of how to be comfortable with your body, you might just be ready to do the deeper work.

If you live in Florida, I can help! You can check out more about me and my philosophy here, and connect with me to see if we would be a good fit.

Getting uncomfortable, understanding why, not starting with body positive messages, developing body image resilience, and getting help are only some of the ways to start to figure out how to be comfortable in your own body. Everyone is different - pick and choose what feels right for you. Also remember - you are not alone in your body image struggles.