5 Tips to Navigate Holiday Eating Without Food Guilt or Overeating

In the long run, improving your relationship with food makes food-centric celebrations easier to navigate and far more pleasurable—without a side of guilt and shame. But changing your relationship with food doesn’t happen overnight.

If you're reading this just weeks or days before Thanksgiving or Christmas, all is not lost. Here are five simple, actionable things you can do right now to increase your short-term pleasure in holiday foods and lay the groundwork for deeper peace around food.

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.

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.

How to Stop Binge Eating

Binge eating is consuming a large amount of food quickly and mindlessly without regard to hunger, fullness, or physical comfort.

Dieting taught me how to binge eat.

It started with calorie counting…

Intuitive Eating 101: The 10 Principles

Intuitive Eating is a framework of 10 principles that support self-care and can help you improve your relationship with food and your body. It helps you relearn how to listen to and trust internal cues of hunger, fullness, and satisfaction rather than relying on strict external diet rules.

A Nutritionist's Concerns About Weight Loss Drugs

Considered by some to be an “easy fix,” these drugs have to potential to exacerbate anti-fat bias. The affordability, spotty insurance coverage, and the fact it won’t work for everyone (either because it simple doesn’t work or the side effects are untenable), or someone simply doesn’t care to take a medication, means these biases will unduly impact those with marginalized identities including those in larger bodies, POC, trans folks, and those with lower socioeconomic status.

How to Approach Picky Eating

It can take 15 or more exposures to a food before it is accepted. Try serving it in different ways too – roasted, sautéed, raw (for things like veggies and fruit), shredded, cubed, etc. Flavors and textures of food change depending on how they are prepared. Just keep serving it! You can also introduce foods during non-mealtimes to take some of the pressure off from eating it. Talk about foods you see while prepping, grocery shopping, in a garden, on the counter. Let kids touch and play with food to get more familiar with it.

There Is More To Nutrition Than Counting Calories

Looking back now I think of all of the things I could have done instead of focusing all my time and attention on memorizing or tallying calories. I could have written a book, or learned to play the piano, or invented some revolutionary product. Who knows? My mind was otherwise occupied with thoughts of food and calories.

Intuitive EatingAmber HansonOctober 17, 2018gentle nutrition, honor your hunger, feel your fullness

Featured in: