The Intuitive Eating Hub
Welcome to The Intuitive Eating Hub, a unique space where you can learn about the principles of Intuitive Eating from the perspective of an Anti-Diet Mindset Coach.
In this space, I'll be sharing with you how Diet Culture can rewire your neural pathways, changing the way your brain sends signals to your body based on the environment you put your body in.
For example, have you noticed that you tend to reach for junk food when you're feeling stressed or anxious? Or maybe you automatically associate certain foods with guilt or shame? These auto-responses are a direct result of Diet Culture's messaging, and they can be unlearned with the right tools and support.
That's where working with an Anti-Diet Culture Health and Mindset Coach can bring something different to your previous attempts to embrace health without all the diet rules. Together, we'll explore your relationship with food, your body, and your mindset, and work to rewire those automatic responses to food, emotions, stress, boredom, and so much more.
In this space, you'll find information on the basics of Intuitive Eating, tips for getting started, and resources to help you along the way. You can also ask questions, share your aha moments, insights, and appreciations in the Main Stage Feed to connect with other members of our community who are on a similar journey.
Thank you for joining me in The Intuitive Eating Hub. I'm excited to support you on your path to a more positive and healthy relationship with food and your body.
x Ellenie
The Ten Principles of Intuitive Eating
1. 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.
2. Honor Your Hunger
Keep your body biologically fed with adequate energy and carbohydrates.Otherwise you can trigger a primal drive to overeat. Once you reach the moment of excessive hunger, all intentions of moderate, conscious eating are fleeting and irrelevant. Learning to honor this first biological signal sets the stage for rebuilding trust in yourself and in food.
3. Make Peace with Food
Call a truce; stop the food fight! Give yourself unconditional permission to eat. If you tell yourself that you can't or shouldn't have a particular food, it can lead to intense feelings of deprivation that build into uncontrollable cravings and, often, bingeing. When you finally "give in" to your forbidden foods, eating will be experienced with such intensity it usually results in Last Supper overeating and overwhelming guilt.
4. Challenge the Food Police
Scream a loud no to thoughts in your head that declare you're "good"for eating minimal calories or "bad" because you ate a piece of chocolate cake. The food police monitor the unreasonable rules that diet culture has created. The police station is housed deep in your psyche, and its loudspeaker shouts negative barbs, hopeless phrases, and guilt- provoking indictments. Chasing the food police away is a critical step in returning to Intuitive Eating.
5. Discover the Satisfaction Factor
The Japanese have the wisdom to keep pleasure as one of their goals of healthy living. In our compulsion to comply with diet culture, we often overlook one of the most basic gifts of existence the pleasure and satisfaction that can be found in the eating experience. When you eat what you really want, in an environment that is inviting, the pleasure you derive will be a powerful force in helping you feel satisfied and content. By providing this experience for yourself, you will find that it takes just the right amount of food for you to decide you've had "enough."
6. Feel Your Fullness
In order to honor your fullness, you need to trust that you will give yourself the foods that you desire. Listen for the body signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry. Observe the signs that show that you're comfortably ful. Pause in the middle of eating and ask yourself how the food tastes, and what your current hunger level is.
7. Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness
First, recognize that food restriction, both physically and mentally, can, in and of itself, trigger loss of control, which can feel like emotional eating.Find kind ways to comfort, nurture, distract, and resolve your issues. Anxiety, loneliness, boredom, and anger are emotions we all experience throughout life. Each has its own trigger, and each has its own appeasement. Food won't fix any of these feelings. It may comfort for the short term, distract from the pain, or even numb you. But food won't solve the problem. fI anything, eating for an emotional hunger may only make you feel worse in the long run. You'll ultimately have to deal with the source of the emotion.
8. Respect Your Body
Accept your genetic blueprint. Just as a person with a shoe size of eight would not expect to realistically squeeze into a size six, it is equally futile (and uncomfortable) to have a similar expectation about body size. But mostly, respect your body so you can feel better about who you are. It's hard to reject the diet mentality if you are unrealistic and overly critical of your body size or shape. All bodies deserve dignity.
9. Movement - Feel the Difference
Forget militant exercise. Just get active and feel the difference. Shift your focus to how ti feels to move your body, rather than the calorie-burning effect of exercise. If you focus on how you feel from working out, such as energized, it can make the difference between rolling out of bed for a brisk morning walk or hitting the snooze alarm.
10. Honor Your Health - Gentle Nutrition
Make food choices that honor your health and taste buds while making you feel good. Remember that you don't have to eat perfectly to be healthy. You will not suddenly get a nutrient deficiency or become unhealthy, from one snack, one meal, or one day of eating. It's what you eat consistently over time that matters. Progress, not perfection, is what counts.
As an Anti-Diet Mindset Coach, I want to emphasize the importance of not only understanding the principles of Intuitive Eating, but also being aware of the hidden tripwires that can get in the way of your progress.
These little known tripwires are the common pitfalls that can undermine your efforts to tune in to your body's needs and eat intuitively.
But the good news is that by identifying and dismantling these tripwires, you can stay on track and continue to make progress toward a more positive and healthy relationship with food and your body.
As you work to incorporate the 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating into your life, I encourage you to also keep an eye out for these tripwires and stay mindful of how they may be affecting your mindset and behaviors.
With the right mindset and tools, you can break free from Diet Culture's grip and embrace the joy and freedom of Intuitive Eating.
The 10 Hidden Tripwires to Intuitive Eating
1. Reject the Diet Mentality Tripwire
It's not just 'Diets' you need to reject, because 'dieting' is only one aspect of the dehumanising nature of Diet Culture. Diet Culture is a pervasive societal force that shapes your beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors around food and body size. And without seeing the full scope of their reach, you may struggle to embrace Intuitive Eating.
For more information around the reach that Diet Culture has, see the Escaping Your Diet Culture Cage found here in the Resource Centre.
2. Honor Your Hunger Tripwire
Diet Culture's advice can often cause you to disconnect from your hunger cues. This disconnection can have a negative impact on the neuroplasticity of your brain, and as a result you may struggle to even know what hunger feels like. Leading to a persistent cycle of overeating, undereating, and guilt that can wear you down and cause you to give up on Intuitive Eating.
3. Make Peace with Food Tripwire
If you've been following diets and restrictions for a long time, these habits can become deeply ingrained in your neural pathways, creating automatic responses and patterns of thinking related to the meaning of the food you eat. So when you attempt to call a truce on food and give yourself unconditional permission to eat everything, these ingrained habits and automatic responses surface, making it difficult to embrace Intuitive Eating.
4. Challenge the Food Police Tripwire
When you follow diets and strict food rules, your subconscious may have developed habits and automatic responses that make it hard to break free from your Food Police. For instance, when you try to challenge them and their negative thoughts, you may experience intense cravings or feelings of guilt after eating certain foods, because these feelings stem from habits developed in your neural pathways as a result of following strict dietary rules.
5. Discover the Satisfaction Factor Tripwire
Because Diet Culture's strict food rules and restrictions can have a profound impact on your neural pathways and subconscious brain, you may struggle to know what you truly enjoy and what will bring you pleasure in the absence of diets. You may find you've been confusing compliance with your diet to connection with your body. Leading you to believe that you only feel satisfied when you stick to your diet, and without this structure or benchmarks you have no idea what food satisfaction looks like.
6. Feel Your Fullness Tripwire
The problem lies in the impact that Diet Culture has had on your neural pathways and ability to understand your body's fullness signals. One tripwire in this is the fact that you may have no idea what fullness feels like. And due to the practice of shutting down your hunger signals, you may have also unknowingly shut down your ability to regulate your fullness cues, so now you only feel fullness when you're really, really full.
7. Cope with Your Emotions Tripwire
Challenging emotional eating can be a difficult task. This is because when you shut down your hunger and fullness cues, your brain also suppresses your positive and negative emotions, which are critical data for decision making. Due to the changes in your neural pathways and brain-body connection caused by dieting, you may struggle to accurately recognize and respond to your emotions, leading to what feels like low tolerance and explosive emotional outbursts.
8. Respect Your Body Tripwire
Although respecting and accepting your body is life-changing, the journey to body positivity goes beyond body diversity and is challenged by the deep-seated anti-fat bias in our society. This bias operates on three levels - intrapersonal, interpersonal, and institutional - and whether you know it or not, its effects are deeply ingrained in your neural pathways making something as natural as respecting your body and finding value in yourself without your body being a part of that equation, feel out of reach.
For more information around societies anti-fat bias, see the 3-Levels of Anti-Fat Bias found here in the Resource Centre.
9. Movement - Feel the Difference Tripwire
When you've been conditioned to view exercise as a tool for burning calories and hitting targets like step counts or intensity, it can be difficult to shift your mindset towards finding pleasure in movement.
This "burn to earn" mentality can become ingrained in your neural pathways and create a distorted view of what it means to feel good through physical activity. Even when you try to shift your focus towards finding joy in movement, your Diet Culture lens can still be present and distort your perception of what "feeling good" should feel like.
This is similar to Tripwire 5, where you may struggle to recognize what brings you pleasure in physical activity without these external benchmarks. As an anti-diet mindset coach, I help my clients rewire their neural pathways and discover the joy of movement without the constraints of Diet Culture.
10. Gentle Nutrition Tripwire
When we've been conditioned to associate certain foods and meals with diets, it can activate old neural pathways, thoughts, and fears, causing us to feel as though we're still dieting, even when we're not.
This is a common tripwire in the journey towards Intuitive Eating. Our brains have been wired to link specific foods with dieting, making it challenging to fully embrace Intuitive Eating and trust our own desires for gentle nutrition. We might find ourselves questioning whether we're secretly dieting just because we choose a salad over pasta.
As an anti-diet mindset coach, I help my clients recognize and overcome these tripwires, empowering them to understand that we own "healthy food", not Diet Culture. By doing so, my clients can embrace Intuitive Eating Principle 10 with trust and confidence in their own choices.
3 Tips to Get Started with Intuitive Eating
Here are three tips to help you get started with intuitive eating from an Anti-Diet Health and Mindset Coach Perspective.
Practice Self-Compassion
Intuitive eating is not a diet, and it's not a quick fix. It's a process that takes time and patience. It's important to approach it with a mindset of self-compassion, which means treating yourself with kindness, understanding, and empathy.
When you make a mistake or fall back into old habits, remind yourself that it's okay and that you're still learning. You can't get intuitive eating wrong.
As an Anti-Diet Health and Mindset Coach, I believe that it's important to work with my clients for an extended period of time to help them rewire their neural pathways and make lasting changes.
While my online program, the Kickstart Project inside the Mastermind, is designed to jumpstart your journey to a diet-free life in just 12 weeks, I provide support and guidance for a full year to help you cement your new habits and resist the pull of Diet Culture.
Additionally, start small by incorporating intuitive eating practices into your life one step at a time. Focus on one principle at a time, such as eating when you're hungry or stopping when you're full, and build on your progress gradually.
By practicing self-compassion and starting small you can begin your journey to a healthier, happier relationship with food and your body.
Build Your Support System
Connecting with a supportive community can be incredibly beneficial when you're embarking on the journey of rewiring outdated neural pathways and replacing them with new, intentional behaviors.
Surrounding yourself with like-minded individuals who understand the challenges and triumphs of this process can help you feel less alone and more motivated to stick with your goals.
Join the Kickstart Project
If you're ready to go all in, then the Kickstart Project is for you. The Kickstart Project offers a tight knit, supportive community for those serious about unravelling Diet Culture's impact on their lives, rewiring their Diet Brain and rewriting their beliefs.
Follow a Proven Process
Breaking free from your Diet Culture Cage and rewiring your default response to food can be a daunting task, especially if you've been dieting for years, if not decades already.
Can you really afford to waste more time going at it alone?
That's why having a proven step-by-step process created by an Anti-Diet Mindset Coach like myself, who was stuck in Diet Groundhog Day for over 30 years and knows first hand what it takes to snap out of it and get back into the driver's seat of your body, can be invaluable.
Working with an Anti-Diet Health and Mindset Coach, Nutrition Coach and Personal Trainer will give you a perspective that isn't covered in books, and help you overcome any challenges that arise during your journey to food freedom so you don't get spooked and go running back to Diet Culture.
Having a proven process to follow can help you stay on track and avoid defaulting back to your old dieting habits.
With the right guidance, like that provided in the Kickstart Project, you'll learn how to embrace Intuitive Eating and cultivate a healthy relationship with food and your body. You'll also learn how to identify and dismantle your limiting beliefs, create a positive mindset, and develop the skills you need to navigate the ups and downs of your journey to success.
If you're truly committed to freeing yourself from the constraints of Diet Culture and achieving food freedom, then I invite you to join the Kickstart Project today.
It's time to reclaim your body from Diet Culture, and embrace health without all the rules.
Testimonial
Odette Anderson - New Zealand
Ellenie , I just want to thank you again because honestly you changed my life in a way that I thought it would never be changed. To get out of that prison, and it was a prison! Full of self hatred of my body and dieting since I was a child - you did that for me! And you know how my husband can't thank you enough either for helping me see what he's always seen in me.
Comments