In my years of working with people around eating disorders and disordered eating, I can’t tell you the number of times someone describes feeling out of control with chocolate chips and peanut butter. At face value it may seem innocent enough: chocolate and peanut butter are two delicious items, duh. And sure, they are delicious! But for all the unique people with unique and individual tastes I’ve seen, I find it hard to believe so many favor a spoonful of peanut butter with chocolate chips thrown on top as their treat of choice.
Read MoreWhen someone begins to practice Intuitive Eating they pretty quickly understand how important it is to build awareness of how things feel in their body (emotions, food, movements….) And whether that’s a welcome task or a feared task, it can feel monumental.
Read MoreWith the rise in use of GLP1’s, we are hearing more and more conversations (and judgments) about their role in weight loss and seeing more and more people whose bodies are changing. At times there is a real lack of nuance in the discussion. While it can sometimes come from a well-intentioned place, it’s still hurtful to those who are trying their best to make a decision that feels best for them at this moment in time.
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One principle of Intuitive Eating is Honor Your Hunger. While it may seem simple (ringing up past moments of diet-y advice to ‘just eat when you’re hungry and stop when you’re full!’), we know it’s more than that. After decades of being told that your hunger is something to be controlled, revered, or ignored, honoring it feels scary and somewhat impossible.
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“I get it (intuitive eating, health at every size, food freedom), but I don’t get it”. Translation: “intellectually I understand the concept, but experientially I’m at a loss.” This feels SO hard. So hard because we can know and understand the evidence that supports Intuitive Eating and Health at Every Size, but feel clueless as to how to make it feel true and put the concepts into practice.
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Okay, so we’re post-Thanksgiving and middle-holiday season. A normal response (that we’ve been conditioned to believe is a bad way our body responds to evil food) is to sometimes get bloated. It can trigger a reaction in us that induces guilt, pushes us to start planning how we’re going to adjust our eating to ‘fix’ it, and makes us feel like we did something wrong. Our heads can be scary places after (what are normal) experiences of eating past fullness.
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Weight loss efforts are appealing for so many reasons. The one that gets a lot of attention is the end result-the promise of a body that will make you feel proud, a body that will make all of the other things you worry about somehow cease to exist (or at least cause less worry), a body that is the body you were meant to have. All of which are appealing as hell when we’re spiraling, deeply ashamed of our body. And all of which we realize after a ‘successful’ weight loss effort are actually totally false.
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It’s the day after Halloween. You wake up feeling a mix of guilt and fear. Guilt because you ate all the candy that didn’t get passed out (candy that isn’t even a kind you particularly enjoy, which you did on purpose), wrappers in a heap on the table that you quickly smushed together and disposed of, angry with yourself and unable to tolerate seeing the ‘evidence’. Along comes fear. Fear that you’re not going to be able to pass up the leftover candy everyone is bringing in to the office today. Or maybe you feel resolve, confident you can pass it up because you are so disgusted with yourself you just know you’ll be able to be strong.
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I often think of this phrase as I see people begin to heal their relationship with food. When we’re stuck in the painful, endless cycle of binge/shame/restrict, our joie de vivre is squashed. There is very limited ability to delight in the joy of being alive when your mind is endlessly screaming at you about eating (either for being ‘bad’ or screaming to keep it together and eat perfectly), not having it (your body) together, and generally feeling a sense of unease.
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