What To Expect When You Work with An Intuitive Eating Counselor
You’re at diet rock bottom, desperately looking for a way out…
All you want is to feel NORMAL and in control around food. You want to eat without constantly feeling guilty or deprived. You want to stop counting, tracking, and measuring every bite of food you eat (or feeling as though you should be).
You’ve been toying with the idea of Intuitive Eating—perhaps you’ve even dipped your toes in. And while it sounds so simple in theory—listen to your hunger and fullness cues, eat foods you enjoy without guilt, pay attention to how foods make you feel—you’re starting to realize there’s a lot more to healing your relationship with food and your body and eating intuitively than meets the eye.
Now, you’re wondering if you should work with an Intuitive Eating counselor. But how does it work? What’s their role? What’s yours? How does working with an Intuitive Eating counselor differ from the other dieting plans or nutrition professionals you’ve worked with? And what results can you realistically expect with Intuitive Eating, given your history with food?
Keep reading for all the answers to these questions and more!
The true role of an Intuitive Eating counselor may surprise you…
I like to describe my role as an Intuitive Eating counselor and coach like this. I’m the tour guide on your Intuitive Eating journey.
My job is to meet you where you’re at, learn as much as I can about where you’d like to go (ie, your goals), and then help guide and support you as you reach those goals and heal your relationship with food and your body. I can point out lots of helpful information and facts along the way that will enrich and support your journey. I’ll ask lots of thought-provoking questions to help you navigate successfully around potholes and roadblocks you encounter. And I'll offer you all sorts of useful tools and encouragement to make your healing journey as fruitful and impactful as possible.
I’m the tour guide. But YOU are the bus driver. In other words, you’re the one who ultimately decides which routes we take, what turns we make, and where you do and don’t want to go.
That’s because, unlike with dieting, Intuitive Eating isn’t about me, the expert, giving you a prescriptive meal plan and then promising you weight loss if you can follow the plan. On the contrary, my job is to help you become the expert in your own body and its nourishment needs. To help you feel confident and comfortable trusting your food preferences and body cues, as you work towards body acceptance and neutrality. I’m here to help you clarify and honor your unique personal values around how YOU’D most like to care for your health and wellbeing.
If I’ve done my job well as an Intuitive Eating counselor, by the time we’re done working together, you’ll be listening to your own body more than you’re listening to any nutrition wisdom I have to share with you!
That’s the big picture of working with a dietitian and Intuitive Eating counselor like myself—finding your “forever” approach to food, as I like to call it. But how do I actually help you heal your relationship with food and your body, rebuild self-trust with your eating, and prioritize health-promoting self-care? What does the process look like?
I personally walk my private and group coaching clients through 5 phases of healing.
Step 1: UN-dieting your mindset and your life
Initially, we spend a lot of time exploring and unpacking your personal experiences with dieting and diet culture so you can begin to non-judgmentally evaluate and understand the true toll of diet culture in your life. I’ll help you consider how dieting has and hasn’t helped you… help you understand both the biology and psychology behind why diets don’t work in the long term … and give you the tools you need to re-evaluate your past experiences with fresh eyes.
Most people are surprised to discover the many ways in which dieting has interfered with various aspects of their lives (physical, social, mental, emotional, and more)—as well as how toxic and pervasive diet culture is. Even people I’ve worked with who don’t have a strong dieting history are usually shocked at the tremendous impact diet culture has had on them.
I’ll also help you cut through the nutrition and diet culture noise, so you can sort out dieting fiction from nutrition facts. I’ll teach you how to break up with the many tools of dieting including calorie counters, food logging apps, diet foods, and rigid meal plans without feeling completely lost and untethered.
You’ll learn how to quiet the toxic influences of diet culture in your daily life—especially when it comes to handling tricky situations with colleagues, friends, and family.
And whenever you’re ready, I’ll support you as you break up with the scale and face the confusing and conflicting emotions that might bring up for you.
Step 2: Building body attunement
Ok, so you’ve ditched the tools of dieting and successfully quieted diet culture in your life. Now what?
In this phase, you learn how to reestablish a deep connection with your body and its cues. I teach you HOW to honor your hunger (without second guessing whether you’re eating too much or not enough) and respect your fullness cues.
I support you when you miss the mark so that instead of getting freaked out or frustrated, thinking this can’t work for you, you learn to practice self-compassion as you unpack your eating experiences. I teach you what questions to ask and how to interpret your eating experiences so you can gather useful feedback and guidance for future meals.
You’ll also learn about the treasure trove of other helpful feedback your body sends you each day that can help you nourish your wellbeing and get your physical, mental, and emotional needs met.
Essentially, there are two phases to building body attunement: identifying and eliminating attunement disruptors and identifying circumstances and prioritizing behaviors that support and cultivate body attunement. Great Intuitive Eating coaches (like, ahem, yours truly) make this a whole lot easier for you!
Step 3: Forget about self-control, we’re shifting to self-care instead
Because diets are all about following a prescribed set of eating rules, they nearly always involve some amount of willpower and self-control.
Intuitive Eating is the opposite. You don’t need willpower and self-control to enjoy eating, to listen to or respect your body, or to practice gentle, FLEXIBLE nutrition strategies.
In this phase, I help you identify your personal values around how you want to eat, move, sleep, manage your stress, and generally care for your body, mind, and wellbeing.
Often, the former dieters I work with have been so busy following dieting “rules,” that they’ve never really considered what’s personally meaningful and important to them when it comes to eating, exercising, and otherwise nurturing their health. This matters because your values are the secret sauce to finding an approach to food, movement, and more that you can actually stick with!
In addition to clarifying your wellness values, you’ll also get loads of ideas, support, accountability, and encouragement as you work to build sustainable, new health habits.
Step 4: Body image healing
Diet culture is toxic, loud, and pervasive. Given our culture’s impossibly thin ideals, hyper-focus on weight and looks, and endless moralizing of food and exercise choices, it’s hard for basically everyone to feel good about and in their bodies. While people in larger bodies are (undeniably and unfortunately) disproportionately impacted by cultural weight stigma and shaming, people in thinner bodies feel the toxic pressure of diet culture too.
In other words, people in all sized bodies can and do struggle with negative body image.
Although diet culture is always there, ready to sell you another diet or rigid meal plan or to make you believe that weight loss is the solution to feeling more confident and comfortable in your body, in reality, that’s not true. Because body image isn’t about your body itself.
Instead, body image is about how you perceive, think, and feel about of your body… and then how you choose to act on those thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. Weight loss MAY change some of those things temporarily—but it’s not a long-term fix. In part because diet culture is always moving the goalposts. But even more so because if you haven’t done the hard work of exploring and understanding where your body beliefs come from, how they impact you, and then reframing them away from diet culture’s toxic ideals, you’re unlikely to find lasting body peace.
That explains why even when you have, perhaps, lost weight in the past, odds are you still didn’t wake up every day loving everything about the way your body looks. You likely felt as though there was more weight to be lost or more body work to be done.
It’s why you may look back at a picture of yourself in a thinner body and, with today’s perspective, think, “gee, I’d give anything to have that body now… why didn’t I appreciate it at the time?” Your body didn’t change at that moment in time. But your current feelings about and perceptions of it have.
I sum it up in my mind by remembering the saying, “wherever you go, there you are.” If you haven’t healed your body image, you’re unlikely to find lasting body peace even if you lose weight.
In this stage of work, I’ll help you explore and reframe your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about your body. I’ll help you understand and challenge the narrative that diet culture has given you about how our bodies are supposed to look. I’ll share tools to help you unsubscribe from diet culture so you can feel more confident and comfortable in the body you’re in right now (after all, it’s the only one you’ve ever really got).
I’ll be here to help you weather challenging body image days. Because the truth is, those don’t magically disappear once you’ve healed your body image or learned to eat intuitively. Instead, they become less intense, carry less weight or significance in your day-to-day life, and you get better at navigating the challenging moments without them completely derailing how you feel about food, exercise, or yourself or pushing you right back into the arms of dieting. That’s the real goal of body acceptance and body image healing!
Step 5: Finding your non-diet tribe
Whether you work with me privately or in a group, I want to help you find an inclusive non-diet, weight neutral, Intuitive Eating community that can support you as you nurture your health and wellbeing, long after our work together ends.
Diet culture is like a loud, rough storm. We may not be able to change the weather… but we can make sure you have the tools to navigate the conditions safely and successfully. A supportive community of people who “get it” are essential to your continued healing and growth. And I’m committed to helping you find them!
Intuitive Eating is the healthful, peaceful, feel-normal-around-food solution you’ve been so desperately searching for!
I could go on and on about the benefits of Intuitive Eating and reimagining your relationship with food, health, and your body all day long.
If you’re at diet rock bottom and ready to reimagine your relationship with food, health, and your body, I really encourage you to seek out the support of a professional, credentialed Intuitive Eating counselor and give it a try.
We know what to expect on the Intuitive Eating journey, what hurdles you’re likely to face (and how we can help you overcome them), and we’re there to help you see and understand things about diet culture, your eating behaviors, and your relationship with food and your body that you may not be able to see as easily yourself.
Yes, it’s an investment. But your health and wellbeing are worth it. YOU are worth it.
If you’d like to learn more and find out if we’re a good fit to work together, I invite you to book a free Whole Health Strategy Session with me here. I’d love to help you find food and body peace so you can nurture and nourish your Whole Health!