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.

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.

The Joy of Baking: One Way To Make Peace with Food

Reclaiming the joy of baking helped me make peace with food (dare I say, bake peace with food?), and maybe it can help you too.

Intuitive EatingAmber HansonSeptember 7, 2023make peace with food

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