Christ Centered Nutrition Counseling
Victory over food though faith Matthew 6:25
OUR MISSION
To promote authentic health and nutrition by encouraging others to respect and nurture their physical, mental, and spiritual needs.
WHAT IS INTUITIVE EATING?
Intuitive eating is an evidenced-based self-care framework. It is a weight-inclusive model that integrates both physical and mental health. There are 10 principles that work together to help you attune to the physical sensations of your body and remove disruptors of meeting your biological and psychological needs.
You will learn how to:
Listen to your hunger and satiety signals
Stop obsessing over food
Eat the right kinds and amounts of foods
Stop the guilt and feel confident with your food choices
Stop eating out of emotion or stress
Be compassionate and trust your body
Benefits include:
Getting off the dieting roller coaster
Making peace with all foods
Developing a healthy relationship with food
Improving body image
Food freedom
Finding satisfaction in eating
10 PRINCIPLES OF INTUITIVE EATING
Adapted from: intuitiveeating.org
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. The reality is, that diets just don't work!
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. Then, 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. Chasing the food police away is a critical step in returning to Intuitive Eating.
5. DISCOVER THE SATISFACTION FACTOR
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 full. 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
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. If 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
Learn to accept and appreciate your "here-and-now" body and 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. All bodies deserve dignity.
9. MOVEMENT—FEEL THE DIFFERENCE
Forget militant exercise. Just get active and feel the difference. Shift your focus to how it feels to move your body, rather than the calorie-burning effect of exercise. When you do this, you will find yourself excited to get moving!
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. It’s what you eat consistently over time that matters. Progress, not perfection, is what counts.
THIS IS DIFFERENT THAN A WEIGHT LOSS PROGRAM
At Embrace Mind & Body Wellness, we value your health. We seek to help you pursue an authentic health by achieving an overall nourishing lifestyle. Our clients are encouraged to begin to view their health through a weight-neutral lens.
Health is impacted not by ones weight alone but more so by the lifestyle they choose to live. We help our clients to shift their focus from losing weight to creating a nourishing relationship with food and body and to make choices that will meet the needs of their mind and body.
When you focus on improving your lifestyle and honoring your body with your food, thoughts, and lifestyle, you will find improved health markers and overall satisfaction in all areas of your life.
WE ARE HAES ALIGNED
The Health At Every Size® (HAES®) is a weight neutral approach to healthcare. It is also a movement working to promote size-acceptance, to end weight discrimination, and to lesson the cultural obsession with weight loss and thinness.
The HAES® approach promotes balanced eating, life-enhancing physical activity, and respect for the diversity of body shapes and sizes. Health At Every Size® principles help us advance social justice, create an inclusive and respectful community, and support people of all sizes in finding compassionate ways to take care of themselves.
*We acknowledge our thin privilege*