What You Need to Know About Gentle Nutrition

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What You Need to Know About Gentle Nutrition

Gentle nutrition begins to consider how we can incorporate information about nutrients and the health-promoting properties of specific food-types in a way that is not morally laden or rule bound. But we need to be actively challenging both the moral judgments we’ve attached to food and the food rules we’ve internalized before we are going to be able to integrate nutrition information in a way that is truly neutral. Which means, we’ve really got to work through the earlier Intuitive Eating principles before this one is going to be accessible.

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How to Make Meal Prep Fit Your Life (& Not the Other Way Around)

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How to Make Meal Prep Fit Your Life (& Not the Other Way Around)

Over the past few months, I’ve found myself having a lot of conversations about meal prepping with clients. Something that struck me as a common experience when talking with folks was that most felt meal prepping was the key to eating “healthier” and making the “right” food choices. The other thing I noticed was that meal prep in general felt for many like a huge (and daunting) undertaking due to the time it took, and because it brought them little joy when they were actually doing it. And most, if not all, felt their inconsistency with meal prep was a shortcoming of theirs and didn’t question whether the ways we’ve been taught to think about and do meal prep were maybe part of the problem.

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Can Healthy Eating and Intuitive Eating Co-Exist?

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Can Healthy Eating and Intuitive Eating Co-Exist?

One of the fears many clients report when we talk about letting go of food rules is, “If I let go of the rules, I’ll only eat the unhealthy foods.” There’s a lot to unpack in this sentence, including the black and white belief that foods are either healthy or unhealthy, but also why this fear exists in the first place and what they fear would happen if this were true. This post, however, will focus what I think the main question is, which is: “can I eat intuitively and also desire to eat nutrient dense foods?”

The ways in which intuitive eating is depicted in the popular media and by many social media influencers often doesn’t help matters much when it comes to contemplating this question. So often leading people to view the intuitive eating concept of unconditional permission to eat as synonymous with eating with abandon (which it’s not) and making doughnuts the unofficial symbol for intuitive eating.

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Becoming an Intuitive Eater: Understanding Appetite Cues

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Becoming an Intuitive Eater: Understanding Appetite Cues

Appetite cues, also known as hunger and fullness cues, are the sensations we experience in our bodies that help to communicate when our body needs nourishment and when it’s had enough. They are regulated by a complex system of hormones and other chemical messengers. However, this internal regulatory system can also become dysregulated, making eating in response to these cues quite challenging. So, how do we eat intuitively if our appetite cues are all out of sorts?

In this post we’ll discuss:

  • How dieting and disordered eating contribute to appetite cue dysregulation

  • How to re-regulate and reconnect with appetite cues

  • Other possible disruptors to appetite cues and what to do if we experience any of these.

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