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 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.

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

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.

Food and Mood: 6 Nutrients For Anxiety and Depression

What we eat does impact how we feel. If we skip regular meals and prop ourselves up with caffeine, sugar, and refined snack foods, we are not only missing important nutrients, but we are also causing blood sugar, our brain’s preferred energy source, to erratically spike and drop throughout the day, which is very stressful on the body.

Mental HealthAmber HansonDecember 11, 2023gentle nutrition

What is Anti-Diet Gentle Nutrition?

If you have been around here for a while you may have noticed a change in the language used to describe Whole You Nutrition. In the past few months, I have updated business materials including the website to explicitly state “anti-diet gentle nutrition.” You might be wondering, what exactly does anti-diet gentle nutrition mean?

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.

4 Reasons to Work with a Licensed Nutritionist

Have you considered working with a nutritionist but aren’t quite sure if it makes sense for you? Read on to learn 4 reasons why you might want to add a licensed nutritionist to your care team.

Gentle Nutrition, Intuitive EatingAmber HansonFebruary 1, 2022Whole You Nutritiongentle nutrition

Eat the Rainbow: How Colorful Foods Can Improve Your Health

The idea behind eating the rainbow is to get a variety of different foods on your plate each day. Did you know the color of your food can give a hint as to what health promoting phytonutrients it contains? Here I will breakdown the color code so you can learn the benefits of adding ROY G BIV to your meals and snacks.

Gentle NutritionAmber HansonJuly 23, 2021gentle nutrition

How to Detox Your Body

It is important to keep in mind a few things as we navigate detox and cleanse messages during this time of year. First, our body has a pretty amazing system in place that detoxes your body on the daily. And second, all those packages of juices, shakes, and supplements are trying to profit off your fears. The very same fears that those products are perpetuating in their marketing. One way to avoid the pitfalls of very convincing messages cultivated to help us part with our hard-earned dollars in exchange for a box of green juice or a canister of powder is to know more about how the body works.

Gentle NutritionAmber HansonMarch 18, 2021gentle nutrition

Intuitive Eating classes are accessible worldwide

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