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.

Gentle NutritionAmber HansonJune 30, 2025gentle nutrition

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

5 Tips to Make Holiday Eating More Enjoyable

In the long term, improving your relationship with food makes food-centric celebrations easier to navigate and more pleasurable. The challenge with changing your relationship with food is it doesn’t happen quickly. However, if you are reading this just weeks or days before the holidays, all is not lost. There are some simple things you can do now that increase your short-term pleasure in holiday foods and lay the groundwork for deeper work in the future.

Why I Quit Social Media and 6 Things I Do Instead

Social media is a hot topic these days. It is both blamed for the downfall of humanity while at the same time providing life-affirming connections for those who may be otherwise isolated.

My decision to quit social media took a few years and a good amount of personal reflection. For me, I found the toll it took on my mental and emotional health was greater than the benefits I gained from being on it.

How Intuitive Eating Works: Interoceptive Awareness - The Science of Intuition

Intuitive Eating is not a random list of rules. The principles were developed to help you better sense, understand, and respond to your body’s internal cues. They help you improve your body awareness or remove obstacles that make it harder to have body awareness.

Strengthening interoceptive awareness will make it easier to notice and respond appropriately to your body’s internal signals, including hunger, fullness, and tricky emotions.

The Truth About Weight Loss and Intuitive Eating: What You Need to Know

The long and short of it is that intuitive eating is not a diet. Not even a non-diet diet. Or an anti-diet diet. Diets are about changing your physical body, usually to make it smaller. Focusing on weight will make it impossible to truly eat intuitively.

Intuitive eating is about changing your relationship with food and your body; it is not about changing your body size.

Gentle Nutrition: Eat Healthy Without Diet Rules

From a young age, all of us have been lied to about diets and nutrition. Most of us believe, without question, that if you just find the right foods and the right diet, your body and your life will magically transform into something better. The details might change, but the societal pressure to get it right doesn’t.

Despite what we have been taught, there is another way, a better way, to think about food without restriction, elimination, guilt, or shame: Gentle Nutrition.

Intuitive EatingAmber HansonJuly 22, 2024gentle nutrition

Intuitive Eating classes are accessible worldwide

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