Hello, hello. Welcome back to the Be About Being Better podcast. Y'all, I'm so excited for today's topic today. We were talking about intuitive eating and we're gonna be talking about all the basics so this is really intuitive eating 101. This is one of our most highly requested topics for the show. People wanna know what is intuitive eating, how do you implement it? Where did it even stem from? Is this intuitive eating? Is this not? So we'll kind of talk about all of those things and break up a lot of misconceptions and then make this really actionable. If you wanna start healing your relationship with food, if you wanna get away from dieting, how do we start incorporating some of these intuitive eating principles into our practice.
We can feel better about how we eat and that it doesn't have to be so hard and we don't need to be tracking every calorie, but also how do we balance that? How do we make it not so much of a free for all where we're just screw it, I'll just eat everything. And that makes us feel guilty when we're just binging on more calorie, dense foods all the time.
How do we start to have a balance with these things? And I introduced this concept in. Episode two, where we were talking about the different health tips for busy high achievers. So if you haven't listened to that episode, definitely go back and listen to that and you'll get other tips in there too.
But one of the tips that I provided is that you really need to start healing your relationship with food. And the way that we do that is through intuitive eating. I just finished up my intuitive eating counselor certification and I am obsessed with it.
It was so great learning about intuitive eating before the certification and during the certification, because I was already coaching people through these things and through the principles of intuitive eating, even before it had the framework for it, which is really great and really reassuring to hear. So if you've been through our programs in the past, these things will probably sound similar and you'll be proud of yourself that you are not starting from ground zero when it comes to this.
So as I go through the different principles of what makes up intuitive eating, even if you haven't been through our programs before, I know that you're not starting from ground zero. When it comes to healthy living and your relationship with food, you are doing some things, right? And we have such a negativity bias naturally, and we want to fix things, especially if you're gravitating towards this show, I'm sure you want to be about being better and strive for a higher level of success.
But I also want you to recognize that you were not broken. You do not need to be fixed. You were doing a lot of things right. So as I'm going through this, I want you to also be congratulating yourself and recognizing, acknowledging yourself with what you are already doing.
Well when it comes to your relationship with food and what you're eating, and then you can also think, here's a few areas that I think I could improve on. And here's where I'd like to start. I'd like to start incorporating this principle, but I'm already doing this well. So I'm gonna challenge you to think about both those, what am I already doing well and what is an opportunity for growth for me, not just focusing on what can I improve on or the opportunities for growth. We wanna think of the positive as well.
So a little bit about intuitive eating's background, intuitive eating. Why I love it is because it was developed by registered dieticians. And it is an evidence based model. There have been hundreds of studies that are published, showing its effectiveness in healing people's relationship with food and a wide variety of other positive health outcomes.
We'll get into those, but I love that it was developed by two registered dieticians, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch in 1995. Intuitive eating is defined as a personal process that honors your health by listening to your body's cues and not just listening for your body's cues, but responding to your body's cues as well.
BEcause a lot of you can sense when you're hungry and when your stomach is growling and screaming at you, but you're not responding, you're choosing not to eat. And some of you might even be feeling empty or hungry and you're starving and you're happy about it. Cause you're like, oh, it's, you know, and nothing tastes as good as skinny feels and stuff like that.
And it's like, okay… that might be a little bit of a red flag um, if you, if you believe that or get excited when you're hungry. Right? So it's like sometimes we hear these biological cues and our body is telling. Something, but we're not responding or we're not responding in a way that is out of care, love and respect for yourself so that this is the essence of intuitive eating that you are in tune with your body's cues.
And then you're taking that one step further. You are responding to those direct messages to meet your body's needs and you're responding in a way. That's what, you know, these two registered dieticians say is rooted in dignity. It's rooted in self care. It's rooted in respect for yourself and just coming at your approach for eating and living through this lens of care, love and respect for yourself.
It's composed of 10 different principles that work to either increase your interoceptive awareness. We've talked about this on the podcast before, basically in interoceptive awareness is when you're in tune with. With yourself in tune with your body's cues. So the principles either help to increase your awareness of yourself, or it helps to remove any obstacles that would prevent you from feeling in tune with your body's cues, with your body's sensations.
It is not about weight loss, intuitive eating is not about. Losing weight or changing your body in any way. So it's a weight neutral weight, inclusive model for eating, and it's very health at every size aligned. And it's, it's really evidence based. There's a lot of studies out there that, um, that, that support this.
And I'd also like to note that intuitive eating tends to be used interchangeably with mindful eating or flexible control eating. Or a balanced way of eating and it's, it's a little different than that. Intuitive eating is more than mindful eating. Intuitive eating is similar to mindful eating in the sense that you honor your body's biological cues. You are not judgemental towards yourself and with mindful eating and intuitive eating. Both of these models believe that you have an inner wisdom, that your body is sending you cues and has this kind of inner sense that you can listen to. But the difference is intuition, it really takes it one step further to really reject dieting, because you could be mindfully eating three strawberries a day or an almond.
I'm sure a lot of us have an almond mom. That's just, you know, just eating an almond. So you could be mindfully eating that, but you might not be eating your body's needs, right? You might still be rooted in diet culture. So with intuitive eating, we are very actively rejecting dieting. We are challenging food rules, either that society is setting or rules that we're setting around or eating.
It also includes even though it's intuitive eating, it also includes an exercise and movement component so that you're approaching exercise. Through this lens of care, love and respect for yourself. And you're not exercising just for the sole purpose of changing your body, making your body smaller or burning off calories or, or making room for more food later, earning calories.
So intuitive eating also has this movement component as well. And it also has. Components for how to approach nutrition instead of getting away from dieting and getting away from all these food rules, how do we approach eating? So it introduces this concept of gentle nutrition that we just need to be eating more gently, not having these super harsh and super aggressive diets or food plans.
So overall mindful eating is more of a skillset. Mindfulness is a part of intuitive eating that you need to be mindful and aware as you are eating. So it's a skill where intuitive eating is more of a self care eating framework. How do you approach living in your health overall? Not just when you're eating.
So I hope that makes sense. That intuitive eating is really going a step further. . There's a lot of science behind intuitive eating, intuitive eating there's hundreds of studies that have shown that it decreases binge eating. It decreases this thin idealization that we're striving for. Thinness. It increases your body appreciation, body trust.
It will help you to enjoy eating. It will help increase your self esteem, your wellbeing, and decrease disordered eating patterns. Um, it will increase your optimism. It will help you to cope better. A lot of people cope with their emotions through food. So intuitive eating helps to increase proactive coping.
You'll not just be coping better and coping with your emotions outside of food and from a place of kindness, but you'll be proactively taking care of. It improves your quality of life overall. And what they're finding is that intuitive eating over time increases food variety. It increases fruit and vegetable intake.
It decreases your triglycerides. It increases your glycemic control, your blood sugar. It increases your HDL, your good cholesterol. So. We're seeing that it's not just increasing your wellbeing and your confidence and your body image, your body appreciation and your thoughts about yourself. But it's also changing how you eat in a sense where you are adding more food variety, and you're having better health outcomes, as far as your blood.
which is amazing. And it's, it's nothing about losing weight or gaining weight. Some people even gain weight by doing intuitive eating, your body's gonna do whatever you're nourishing your body in a way that it needs. You're listening to your body's cue. You're letting your body be the compass. And you're fueling yourself in a way that is meeting your body's needs.
Uh, it's so amazing. So it's great to see that, you know, I think one of the misconceptions about intuitive eating is that because part of it is that we make all foods available and we'll get into all the principles, but we're not restricting our food intake in any way. So you can have ice cream, you can have pizza, you can have a cupcake.
A lot of people take that to me and like, oh, it's just a free for all. You can, whatever junk you want. And that's it. It's like. No, but if you, the principles have to come together, so yes, we might be making all foods available. We're not restricting ourselves, but we're also pairing that with listening to our fullness cues and respecting our fullness cues.
Once you, of course, learn intuitive eating and become, you know, more of an expert in this and get better at it. You listen to your body's fullness cue. And you don't let yourself go overboard . It actually decreases binge eating episodes and overdoing it.
And you start to want a variety cuz you, you know, if you just eat cake all the time, it's like, yeah, that's great that you can allow yourself to eat cake, but eventually you're gonna start craving something different. And you'll actually, through intuitive eating, be in tune with what you are craving and start to choose those things.
So that's where the food variety comes in because your body doesn't want cake for breakfast, lunch, and dinner seven days a week. It doesn't want that. So if you're really in tune with yourself, you'll start to see what you're actually craving and you'll increase your food variety. So this is why I love intuitive eating cuz all of the principles that are coming together makes sense that we're fueling ourselves in a way that we're meeting our body's needs.
We're making all foods available. We're not restricting ourselves. And then we end up naturally finding a balanced way of eating. Now, what I will say is that as we are healing, our relationship with we've been diving into intuitive eating. You might still have binge episodes. You might still overeat and that's okay because you're navigating the process.
The difference here is you're gonna be changing how you approach those episodes. It's not that you're failing your diet. It ends up being feedback for yourself. It's like, okay, well, why did I overeat? Was I coping with an emotion when I really wanna be coping with kindness instead? Or was it that I wasn't listening and wasn't respecting my MIS cues.
Right? So It can give you a lot of feedback on how to course correct in the future to become a better intuitive eater. It's a process as you're healing your relationship with food. So you gotta be nonjudgmental in the process as you're navigating this. And I assume if you're listening to this episode, you want to heal your relationship with food.
So you gotta be, you gotta give yourself grace in the process and you have to give it time. You gotta be. Another thing I'll say about this is that it may require more personalized support and, and more coaching. And this is exactly what we do in our programs is, you know, you start one of our programs, you fill out an assessment, I see what your eating behaviors and eating patterns are, what your beliefs are about health and eating.
What's typical for you? And then we work together for you personally. How do we heal your relationship with food to get you to a place where you're meeting your needs? Without restricting yourself without dieting. And you're in tune with your body's cues and you're responding in that way through care, love, and respect for yourself.
So this is something that we work on on an individual basis with clients, and you might need that level of sport. So if that's you and you're like, you already know, okay, I'm gonna need some help with this, uh, cuz this all sounds great, but I'm not sure how to implement it or I can't trust myself to implement.
Uh, cause I know I'll need some extra accountability or that personalization definitely go to the show notes and take my quiz, see which one of our health coaching programs can be for you. Uh, but definitely take my quiz. That would be the best place to start. All right. So let's dive into the actual principles.
What are the 10 principles that make up intuitive eating number one, we have to reject the diet mentality. This has to come first. We have to get away from get fit quick solutions. They don't work. And actually dieting is the biggest predictor of weight gain. We talked about this in the keto episode.
Uh, so go back to episode four and listen to that. I talk about a lot of research. Supports that dieting does not work over the long term. So we need to get away from the dieting mindset and you have to be focused less on weight loss and changing your body and just making yourself thinner. But think about how can I be healthy?
How can I have a lifestyle that I can actually sustain and maintain over the long term? So we first need to reject the diet mentality. Then principle. Number two, we need to start honoring our hunger. Y'all if you are waiting until your stomach grows to eat, I'm gonna be honest. You're waiting too long.
that's when your body's screaming at you, when your stomach is growling, you have already missed so many other signs that are more subtle, that your body was hungry when your body was whispering to you. But now your body's literally screaming at you. It's like, Hey, you didn't hear me. So now I have to scream at you.
You've waited too long. So you have to start to be in tune with your hunger and listen for those more subtle cues that you are hungry. So that could be a headache. It could be fatigue. It could be a change in mood. You could be more irritable or hangry. You could feel cold, you could lack focus and just not be productive.
You could feel a little bit of a lump in your throat or have a slight stomach ache or a pain in your stomach. Very subtle cues. Your vision could be almost blurry, kind of hard, hard for you to focus your vision. You could feel lightheaded, so many different things, um, and people experience those subtle hunger cues in different ways.
So start listening for your body. What's normal for you before your stomach grows and try and eat. Then principle number three is that you wanna start to make peace with food. You wanna stop labeling foods as good or bad, because then we take that one step further usually to mean that we are a good or bad person.
Like, oh, if I eat these foods, I'm on track. I'm good. I'm, you know, following through. But then if I have these foods I'm failing and I'm bad. So we need to stop, start to take the morality out of food. By stopping how we label foods. Even if we label foods as, you know, good or bad or healthy or unhealthy, they're kind of saying the same things.
So we wanna start to label foods differently, and this is an easy way to start to make peace with food, by making foods more neutral in seeing that everything can fit, but we have things in different amounts. So maybe labeling foods. As, oh, this is a frequent food. This is a less frequent food. Or this is a treat meal.
We're not cheating on ourselves, cuz that would imply morality that you're cheating and that's bad, but this could be a treat meal or a play food or a fun food oh, another way that I label. I'll say, oh, this is more nutrient dense. This is calorie dense. And both of those types of foods fit in our diet because there are times where we need more nutrients and there are times where we need to prioritize more calories.
And these calorie dense foods can still fit in our, because sometimes we need those calorie dense foods because it's good for our wellbeing. It's good for social connection. So that's how they can fit. Not everything that we eat needs to be for the sole purpose of just providing nutrients. Food is. It has so many other purposes.
It can help us to establish connections with other people and be a bonding experience and, you know, social experience good for our wellbeing. So sometimes those calories and foods, like we don't need to get rid of them entirely. It's all foods can fit, but it's in, it's in one amount and it, and why are, why are we doing it?
And are we trying to find a balance? so the important thing is that we want to start to make peace with food and make all foods available and give ourselves unconditional permission to eat those foods. And you might be saying to yourself right now, if I just gave myself permission to eat, I would go crazy.
Well, if you feel like you can't control yourself around a certain food, that's not the problem. The problem is the restriction. We always want what we can't have. It's like a bow and arrow, if you're. Restricting, restricting, restricting a food, pulling back, back, back. Eventually you're gonna let go and you're gonna propel yourself forward.
And that you're, you're gonna just totally swing the other way and overindulge. So we have to let go of the restrictions. We have to give ourselves unconditional permission to eat because that normalizes the food. And if it's just around all the time, it loses its allure. Eventually. So just know, like I said, in the beginning, you might experience some binges when you're exploring intuitive eating and finally letting go of the reins, but that's okay because you will start to find a balance for you and meet in the middle.
And there is a little bit of freedom that comes when we let go of the restriction, but just know any binges that happen are not because you're giving yourself unconditional permission to eat. It's a secondary effect to the restriction. So it's the restriction and letting go.
Those that have allowed you to binge and kind of overdo it, not the unconditional permission to eat, cuz eventually if you give yourself unconditional permission to eat it, it loses its allure. Cuz it's like, why do you need pizza now? And why do you have to finish this now, when you can have it tomorrow?
Right. It's like, oh, you won't feel the need to always finish your plate or, or always order another drink or always get dessert because you could have dessert at any time. A lot of people will overdo it, especially on the weekends, for example, because they don't know when they're gonna allow themselves to have it again.
But if it's like, oh, I can have it tomorrow. So it's like, oh, I don't really need it now. I don't really want it. Now I'm full. So you can really start to be in tune with your cues. And this is probably one of the harder, intuitive eating principles to wrap your arms around. But it's so, so important. And you'll start to see with time that when you let go of the restriction and give yourself unconditional permission to eat, eventually the food has less control over you, and it just becomes more neutral and you don't feel a need to overdo it.
because you realize you can just have it at any time. The next intuitive eating principle number four is that you wanna challenge the food. So a lot of us have food rules and we're monitoring our eating, and we tell ourselves, oh, this is too much. Or, oh, you gotta keep, you know, you have to reach this many grams of protein or you can't eat after AP.
Or if you're hungry, you have to drink water first. Like we have these food rules and. We gotta let those go. And you have to start to be aware of what those rules are and ask yourself, where did this rule stem from? Is this society? Is this something you just heard on TikTok? Where did this stem from? And is this serving me?
Why am I holding this rule? And is this even true? You can eat after API. I'm giving y'all permission. It is going to be okay. rule number five is that you wanna respect your full. Just as we want to honor our hunger and eat when we are first hungry, we want to respect our fullness as well. It's very, very difficult to respect your fullness when you have not honored your hunger.
So if you're getting to your next meal and you're completely ravenous, you're just eating as fast as possible and your body can't catch up. It takes about 20 minutes for your body to realize and send you signals that you're full and give you signals to slow down. So if you're eating so quickly and you finish in less than 20 minutes, it.
Your body hasn't even given you a chance to catch up and then you're going to be overstuffed and uncomfortable. And we all know that feeling of fullness. I always feel this way after hibachi oh my gosh. I love hibachi, but I just find it's very hard for me to respect my fullness cue when I go get hibachi.
So I don't do it very often. And I always see it as a learning experience for myself, but, um, it's very hard to respect your fullness when you haven't respected your hunger. That's why I always recommend people on Thanksgiving to have breakfast on Thanksgiving. Don't wait until your Thanksgiving dinner to be your first meal of the day, because you actually don't end up eating as much as you want to.
And you feel like a stuffed potato. You feel like a stuffed Turkey and it's just too much. Whereas if you eat a little breakfast for, you're not ruining the meal for yourself, you're actually going to be able to savor your food and you're gonna be able to enjoy the meal and respect your fullness even more versus showing up totally ravenous and just focusing on how hungry you are. So you wanna respect your fullness as well. And a great way to start to do this is to put your fork down in between bites. And give yourself time to pause, be present with the people that you're with. Make conversation, stop to have a drink of water or something.
When you're eating slow down, we need to make the experiences of eating more sacred, and we wanna make them slower. If you're just shoveling a protein bar in between calls or going from one patient appointment to the next or running from thing to thing. It's gonna be very hard for you to listen to your body's cues and it's not gonna be a positive eating experience.
And you're also not gonna digest well from eating in such a stressed, rushed state. So you wanna respect your fullness and it's easier to do that when you slow down while you're eating, calm yourself down and be present in that moment. The next intuitive eating principle. Number six is you wanna discover the satisfaction factor?
Food can be enjoyable. I can't even tell you how many clients have said to me that they miss food being enjoyable. And some of them don't even know what that's really like. They've never felt satisfied with food and they've always seen it as like, oh, I have to eat this on my diet, or I can't really eat how I want to eat and food and meal times aren't satisfying. So we want to make eating experiences fun again. So you wanna slow down, you wanna be present with your food and ask yourself questions while you're eating. Like, how does this taste, how does this smell? Like, am I enjoying this? What do I like about it? What am I tasting right now? Really enjoy those moments and be present and just slow down while you're eating.
I think it really stems from slowing down and being present in that moment and trying not to eat with as many distractions. And you might not get to the point yet where you're eating in, you know, complete silence with yourself. If you're not eating with other people and you might still feel the need to, you know, watch TV or something like that.
Um, but maybe you could work it back and just start with not watching something, but just listening to something or putting headphones in, or, um, not watching a show, but listening to a podcast or something like that. Um, and trying to just take a step back versus, going cold Turkey, but you wanna be as present with your food while you're eating as possible, and it will make it a more satisfying experience and easier for you to listen in for your, your fullness cues.
And you also wanna enjoy the food that you're eating. So if you're just having chicken and rice all the time, or you're meal prepping the same thing, or always have the same recipe for overnight odes. And like, and if that gets boring, your food's not satisfying. And it's just so hard for you to intuitively eat.
And that can feel restrictive in a sense when you don't have enough variety. So you want to make sure that you have foods that you're excited to eat and that everything sounds satisfying to you. . Um, so that's where I would say to start, as far as discovering the satisfaction factor is to find recipes that you actually enjoy eating and then slowing down when you eat and being in tune with, how does this taste, how satisfying is this food and what do I like about it?
Be present with eating, and it'll be easier for you to decide when you've had enough to eat. Principle number seven is that you wanna honor your feelings with kindness. So there's gonna be times where we feel anxiousness, loneliness, boredom, anger, stress, and a lot of us turn to food to cope in those moments.
So we want to instead work on how we can deal with those emotions outside of food and treat our bodies with kindness. And, you know, this might take more close counseling or coaching when it comes to food or intuitive eating, it also might take, you know, working with a therapist. So, you know, just know that this stuff takes time getting to the root of it.
Why are we coping with emotions through food? And I think the first step in honoring our feelings and coping with kindness stems from first naming, what that emotion is, you have to know, what are you feeling? Are you feeling anxiousness? Are you feeling bored? Are you feeling stressed? What is that? And then, you know, uh, Elise, what I do is I help clients figure out okay.
In the moment, what are some things that we can do to cope with that emotion that's outside of food, but then also, how can we change your lifestyle a little bit , what changes can we make to mitigate that feeling from happening so often? So if you're coping with your stress from work, Through food when you're feeling stressed from work, we need some strategies for you that will help you in the moment when you're feeling stressed.
But then we also need to address the root cause of the stress coming from work. What can we do there? And that's something I work on very closely with my clients. And sometimes I refer out to a therapist. A lot of our clients are already working with a therapist, which is great, cause our programs work really great in conjunction with clients that are also in therapy.
Because we're working on these deeper things. and some things will, will come up during coaching calls that just need more, more close counseling. So as we get deeper into the root of it, if you are someone who copes with your emotions through food, this is something to, to pay attention to first naming that emotion.
What is it you're feeling and what is something else you could do instead? What would actually work for you to cope with your emotions outside of food? It might be a bubble bath, but you also might be thinking like, okay, when I'm feeling stressed, a bubble bath isn't gonna work for me. Or I normally feel stressed at night.
It doesn't make sense for me to go for a walk outside. That's not safe. It's dark out. So like what would actually work for you? And then with that feeling, what can you do to mitigate that from happening again in the future? How can we start to. Your stress, decrease your loneliness, decrease your boredom, decrease your anxiety, right?
What are some other things that we can do to mitigate that from happening as often, or as severe. The next intuitive eating principle is respecting your body. We've talked about this before. You want to treat your body with kindness. You don't want to be showing up for a healthy lifestyle with the sole purpose of making your body smaller or changing yourself.
You want to honor your body for where it is right now, and honor who you are. Diet culture. And this diet mentality wants you to be striving for unrealistic body standards. It wants you to be overly critical about your body shape and size. So we need to let go of those things. Respecting your body starts from rejecting the diet mentality and starting to approach healthy habits with a difference. Why not for the sole purpose of losing weight and making ourselves smaller, but approaching it. I just want to be healthy. I want to feel more energized. I want to get stronger. I want to honor and nourish myself and approaching your healthy habits through that lens will help you to continuously respect yourself.
The next intuitive eating principle is to exercise and feel the difference. So this is what I was saying at the beginning of the episode, where we don't wanna exercise for the sole purpose of making your body smaller, burning off calories or making room for calories that we're going to have later showing up for exercise should never be a punishment should never be a chore, should never be an obligation.
Instead, you wanna shift your focus from calorie burning to something else, focus on how working out makes you feel. Does it make you feel energized? Does it make you feel confident? Does it make you feel boss? Does it make you feel empowered? Does it make you feel strong? What is that? And focus on that.
And maybe it's getting away from such militant exercise or HIIT workouts all the time or hour long workouts, but doing something that feels fun, moving your body in a way that feels good. That might be a walk that might be strutting on the treadmill that might be yoga or Pilates or dancing in your room.
I just got a trampoline. I love jumping on my trampoline and I love going to dance classes. So. What is it for you? How can you make exercise more fun? And how could we shift ourselves from using the word exercise to movement and just moving your body in a way that feels good versus just exercising or just moving your body for the sole purpose of making your body smaller or burning calories.
And then the last intuitive eating principle is that you wanna honor your health and you wanna do this through gentle nutrition. We wanna be gentle with ourselves. We don't need to do any harsh, super restrictive diets or anything like that. And this is something that I focus on a lot with the clients that I work with is how in the context of your life and your diet and history, how can we get you to start honoring your health?
And how can we do this through one thing at a time, doing something for your health when you previously might have been in an all or nothing, or trying to get away from an all or nothing mentality or, um, diet mentality that is super restric. So, where can you start? Here's all the 10 principles. The first thing that I want you to do is go through and acknowledge yourself.
What are you doing? Well, I just need 10 different ways that you can heal your relationship with food. And I know, I know with a hundred percent certainty that you are doing. Something or multiple things right already. So what is that for you? What are you already doing? Well, call yourself out with the wind and this might be challenging cause we think, oh, I have a long way to go to improve my relationship with food.
We all do. We all do. There's always an opportunity to better ourselves and our health and heal our relationship with food even more. But you're already on your journey. You're already on your way. So what are you doing right. Call that out. and then think about one principle that you think you might wanna start with, which one stuck out to you the most, obviously, ideally we wanna be working on all of these things, but what is the one for you where you're like, yep.
That's where I wanna start. You'll be more effective in healing your relationship with food. If you're starting from a place of motivation, which one do you feel more inclined and more motivated to make a difference? And then if you're not really sure where to start, I think the first one is really rejecting the diet mentality, go back and listen to our keto episode and see the research on why dieting doesn't work.
like I give a lot of testimony from, uh, you know, different followers in there and talk about a few research studies about why dieting doesn't work and specifically the keto diet. So we wanna start rejecting the diet mentality. Then I think a great place to start is to get in tune with your biological hunger cue.
Whether that's your hunger cues or your fullness cues. The next place is I think it's good to start catching yourself with how you label food. We don't wanna label food as good or bad, healthy or unhealthy, but can you catch yourself and be like, oh, I just said, this food is good.
How can I label it differently? Is this a frequent food, less frequent food? Is it nutrient dense? Is it calorie dense? Is it a treat meal? Is it play food? How can we label it differently? Next place to start, or another place to start is that you wanna remove all restrictions. You wanna give yourself unconditional permission to eat.
Another thing that you might wanna do to get started is lead with kindness. Be gentle with yourself. Nothing from your health should be done through force or obligation or punishment. Things should feel good. Things should feel fun because what's fun is sustainable. And then another place, another easy place to start is just to slow down.
When you're eating, pause during a meal, really savor what you're eating, chew your food, put your fork down in between bites. Try not to be distracted while you're eating and focus on what you're eating and how that tastes. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. Let me know what you think about it and let me know, um, what other questions you have when it comes to nutrition, other episodes that you wanna hear, other topics that you want me to dive into?
I will be talking with people about the podcast, mostly in our Be About Being Better Facebook group community. So head to the show notes and check that out. That's where we host some free accountability challenges, but also we'll be getting the most feedback from y'all about the podcast.
So definitely join our feedback, Be About Being Better community there. And if you need personalized support with this, and definitely go ahead in the show notes, take our quiz and see which one of our health coaching programs can be for you. Thanks. Y'all for tuning in, and I will see you in the next episode.
