Why Weight-Inclusive Care Matters in a Weight-Centric World

The beginning of each new year is always a fraught time to have a body. Just yesterday, I took the annual health survey required by our health insurance to “unlock” the activities needed to fund our HSA accounts, I was immediately confronted by everything I hate about the New Year.

Nowhere in this survey was there an option to say you were happy with how you are currently eating, moving, sleeping, or managing stress. It was simply assumed you need to be trying harder or striving to do better.

Intuitive EatingAmber HansonJanuary 28, 2026perimenopause, respect your body

Intention is Everything: Reclaiming Healthy Behaviors from the Grips of Diet Culture

As you begin to explore the anti-diet or Intuitive Eating arena, a specific kind of confusion often sets in. You might find yourself wondering things like:

"If I’m anti-diet, does that mean I’m never allowed to eat a salad or go for a run again? Am I a 'bad' anti-dieter if I actually enjoy vegetables?"

It’s a valid question. Because diet culture has hijacked health behaviors for so long, we have been conditioned to believe that kale and cardio are merely tools for body manipulation. Why would we ever hold a plank if not to shrink our waistlines?

Navigating the Emotional Barriers to Anti-Diet Eating

If you are anything like me when I first embraced intuitive eating and started rejecting diet culture, you understand in a logical, big-brain way why diets don’t work and in theory why an anti-diet approach makes sense. Yet still, there is resistance.

I have found in this work, knowing the facts isn’t enough. We also need to process some intense emotional hurdles because diet culture gave us a powerful, albeit faulty, psychological safety net.

Ditching Diet Culture: Anti-Diet Eating Takes Effort (and That's Okay)

When people first hear about rejecting diet culture, the idea of intuitive eating or adopting a non-diet/anti-diet approach, the reaction is rarely, “Cool, tell me more, this is the answer I have been looking for.”

More often, the idea sets off flashing red warning lights and a loud “Danger, Danger!” siren, followed by a list of objections that might sound suspiciously like your own internal monologue.

Approaching food and your body through this lens requires deep work to unlearn and untangle messages so ingrained you might not even realize they are there.

Gentle Nutrition, Anti-Diet Starter PackAmber HansonOctober 29, 2025gentle nutrition

How to Manage Blood Sugar for Insulin Resistance & Perimenopause: A Gentle Nutrition Guide

My first true nutrition “a-ha moment” was learning about the blood sugar rollercoaster in a group nutrition class. It felt like the secret to fix my body, the one I was hoping to learn in my dietetics undergraduate program, but didn’t. When I started eating to stabilize blood sugar, I almost immediately felt less anxious, slept better, and had more energy.

I learned blood sugar can impact everything from your energy levels to your mood and is particularly relevant for those with insulin resistance, Type 2 diabetes, PCOS, or those navigating perimenopause.

Gentle NutritionAmber HansonSeptember 19, 2025gentle nutrition

What is Body Image? Self-Perception is More Than Appearance

An overly simplified definition of body image is how you picture yourself in your mind’s eye. This often has strong focus on appearance – looks, height, shape, size, and other physical attributes.

And, yes, how you picture yourself is part of the equation. However, that definition falls short of the complex (and sometimes contradictory) way you think, feel, and perceive your body in this world. These beliefs about your body can be both positive and negative and can change over time as you are exposed to new information or experiences.

Body image is a deeply personal internal experience that can be heavily shaped by external influences.

Nourish Your Body with Fiber: A Gentle Nutrition Guide

You might be surprised to learn that fiber is actually a type of carbohydrate. Despite what you may hear from some health and wellness influencers, carbohydrates are an important part of a balanced diet and fiber is a key reason why.

Gentle NutritionAmber HansonMay 31, 2025gentle nutrition

How to Stop Emotional Eating

Since eating is required for survival, feelings of pleasure, satisfaction, and comfort related to it are hardwired into humans to make eating a desirable activity. Many of us learn to use food to help soothe or distract ourselves from uncomfortable emotions because food is readily available and reliably provides, at least momentary, comfort and distraction.

How to Stop Food Noise Without Weight Loss Drugs

There is not one official definition of food noise but, in general, it is the nearly non-stop thoughts about food, eating, hunger, and fullness that flit through the brain. This could include feeling preoccupied with food or constantly thinking about food, increased cravings for food, or a desire to continue eating even when physically full, to name but a few.

Debunking Intuitive Eating Myths: What You Might Be Getting Wrong

Working in the anti-diet and intuitive eating space has always been counter cultural, getting plenty of push back from individuals, doctors, and institutions steeped in the weight-centric paradigm of health and wellness (despite so.much.evidence that diets don’t work).

The last few years have brought a new set of challenges. As more people have started to understand that health is more than that size of one’s body, the people profiting from the status quo have started to co-opt the language of anti-diet and body liberation to sell more diets.

Understandably, confusion ensues.

Perimenopause: Navigating Body Changes and Symptoms with Intuitive Eating and Self-Compassion

Do you remember your first perimenopausal symptoms? Or at least the first time you realized the weird thing happening to you might just be perimenopause?

I sure can remember when things started to change, when things related to my body and menstrual cycle started to impact my normal flow of daily life.

The most noticeable disruption started a few summers ago when I had a stretch of night sweats.

Intuitive EatingAmber HansonJanuary 31, 2025perimenopause, respect your body

How Long Does It Take to Become an Intuitive Eater?

If you clicked on this post looking for a neat and tidy answer like 30 days or 3 months, I am sorry to say I don’t have one. Each of us is starting in a different place and intuitive eating is a map, not the turn-by-turn navigation we have been taught to expect from weight loss diets or wellness programs. It is possible to see and feel changes relatively quickly when starting intuitive eating but switching your default thoughts and behaviors usually takes more time than just a few weeks.

Intuitive EatingAmber HansonDecember 30, 2024

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