Tag Archive for: meal planning

Gentle Nutrition: Self-Care Versus Self Control

One of the biggest misconceptions regarding Intuitive Eating is that nutrition guidelines and recommendations go out the window, or there is no focus on nutrition at all—it’s the “eating whatever you want when you want” mindset. However, this is far from the truth.

Gentle nutrition is the tenth Intuitive Eating principle and reads a little something like this:

 

“Making food choices that honor your health and taste buds while making you feel well. Remember that you do not have to eat perfectly to be healthy. You do not suddenly get a nutrient deficiency or gain weight from one snack, one meal or one day of eating. It’s what you eat consistently over time that matters—progress not perfection is what counts.”

In order to reach a point of where gentle nutrition can be incorporated, there needs to be space created for a positive relationship with food that allows for this. Hence why there are nine principles that come before this that help you…

 

  • Dismantle diet mentality
  • Challenge the food police
  • Get rid of diet rules
  • Reframe limiting beliefs
  • Accept your body

 

A solid foundation built on these principles needs to be in place for nutrition to be brought into the mix and approached in a non-diet way. This way you’re able to make choices from a loving, caring space and that consider all aspects of who you are (mentally, emotionally, and spiritually).

Difference Between Gentle Nutrition and Traditional Nutrition

 

The difference between nutrition from an Intuitive Eating approach vs. traditional approach is that nutrition is rooted in self-care and approaches it in a way that is sustainable.

 

Gentle nutrition is not rigid, restrictive, or filled with complications like traditional nutrition is often taught or perceived.

What does gentle nutrition look like? It’s different for everyone!

 

Here are some examples:

 

  • Having an extremely busy schedule so you choose frozen or convenience foods, but you try adding some fresh vegetable to the dish.
  • Following a gluten free eating style because you have celiac disease.
  • Choosing low FODMAP foods because you struggle with IBS flare ups and foods with low fermentable carbs feel better and don’t trigger symptoms.
  • Intentionally cooking your meals at home most days of the week.
  • Not giving nutrition much of a thought but including as many fruits and vegetables into your day as you feel like.

 

Gentle nutrition is determined by you based on what feels good in your body!

 

Prioritizing nutrition to whatever degree you feel is your choice (it’s not a “should”). You are making the decisions to engage in nutrition in a way that makes you and your body feel good (which embodies the meaning of self-care). Waking up every day and choosing food that helps you work your best, feel your best, and be your best IS a form of self-care.

Gentle Nutrition: Self-Care, Not Self-Control

 

Gentle nutrition takes the approach that you’re going to choose to eat that salad because it makes you feel your best and you want to nourish yourself with foods that make you feel good (self-care).

 

Whereas traditional nutrition takes the approach that you need to eat that salad because it will help you lose weight, get you healthy, or you choose the salad because you feel ashamed to eat anything else, especially in front of others. It is what you “should” do (self-control).

 

Taking nutrition from this approach can be a challenge. If you feel yourself struggling with determining the difference between self-care and self-control when it comes to food choices, ask yourself these questions:

 

  • Do my actions and decisions around food come from a place that feels balanced, free, elastic, and fluid, or do they feel rigid, controlled, and restrictive?

 

  • If I make a choice that strays from nutrition recommendations, how do I feel?

 

Need support in Gentle Nutrition: Check out The Intuitive Nutrition Circle™ (aka The IN Circle™.) where you learn to integrate gentle nutrition with your Intuitive Eating practice.

 

Note: The Intuitive Eating Basics course is a pre-requisite for The IN Circle. But now you can get the Intuitive Eating Basics course AS PART of The IN Circle for a short time only at a special price. Click here for that option and use coupon code FOODPEACE at checkout!

Offer expires 4/1/22

 

 

How to Meal Plan from an Intuitive Lens

After years of dieting, many of my clients resist meal planning. And I totally get it. They’ve made the decision to stop dieting and learn to eat intuitively, and planning meals just reminds them of their dieting days. But is there a way to meal plan through an Intuitive Eating lens? Yes, there is.

First, let’s understand the benefits of meal planning. There are many.

Benefits of Meal Planning

  1. It saves time and stress.

Let’s face it, when you come home at the end of a long day tired, hungry, and stressed, the last thing you want to think about is “what am I making for dinner?”

By knowing in advance what you are going to prepare, and having the ingredients on hand, you cut out the stress and the time trying to figure it out. Take it from me, a working mom who needs to feed her family, the only way to get a balanced meal on the table is to think ahead and plan.

  1. It avoids unnecessary food waste.

When you plan meals ahead of time, this ensures that the ingredients you bought in the grocery store has a purpose – no need to worry about items in your fridge going to waste! This is great on your wallet and the environment

  1. It helps maintain a balanced diet.

With meal planning, you can be sure that you are having a balance of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats since you have thought about what you are making well in advance, as opposed to throwing together whatever you can and as fast as possible when you come home ravenous!

  1. It saves money.

Having planned meals or snacks prevents you from spending money on buying take-out, running through the drive-through, or picking up last minute to-go meals at the convenience store. Many of my clients are amazed at how much money they save when they start planning meals in advance and stop buying out because “I don’t have any food at home.”

Meal planning also allows you to buy food and ingredients in bulk, which can be another great way to save money.

But the question remains, is meal planning  the same as dieting?

Meal Planning is NOT Dieting When…

  • …There is flexibility.

If you’ve put together a menu for the day and for some reason, you aren’t able to prepare or eat what is on the menu (say for example the food spoiled), and you are cool about it and say to yourself “okay, what else do I have that I can eat”, that is meal planning through an intuitive lens. However, if you break out in hives and a sweat because you couldn’t follow the menu you planned for the day, this is dieting!

  • …There are foods on your menus that you like and enjoy versus foods you “should be eating”.

Meal planning that is dieting forces you to think about eating and the foods you eat in a very “black and white” way. For example, these are the foods I can eat because they are healthy, and these are the foods I can’t eat because they are unhealthy”.

Meal planning from an intuitive lens allows you to eat foods you enjoy and that satisfies you versus restricting those foods or limiting them.

  • …There are options.

Meal planning that is dieting is very rigid and structured with not a lot of opportunity to explore new dishes or experiment with foods because “they aren’t on your meal plan”.

Meal planning through an intuitive lens allows you have to options and variety in your meals because you’re listening to what your body wants versus only thinking about what your body “should” need or want.

 

In summary, there are many benefits to meal planning! If you find that planning meals is very rigid and isn’t giving you any room for options or alternatives, you are still dieting, and your diet mentality is running the show.

 

If, however, you are meal planning with the mindset of being prepared, this allows you to be flexible and adjust to whatever situation may come up (i.e., not enough ingredients, you forget an ingredient, food spoiled etc). This, my friend, is meal planning through an intuitive lens.

Let’s dive deeper and start the meal planning process. Come join me at 12:15 pm EST in my Facebook Group for a LIVE training on How to Meal Plan through an Intuitive Lens.

3 Strategies to Help You Nourish Your Body (While Eating Intuitively)

Are you finding it challenging to nourish yourself well these days? The pandemic is certainly bringing up food challenges for people and the result is a lack of structured meals and haphazard eating.

Now that you are home all the time, you might be waking up later, or earlier, finding yourself skipping meals, or have a decreased appetite. Now more than ever, it’s important to nourish your body and protect your immune system with nourishing foods.

3 Strategies to Help You Nourish Your Body During the Pandemic

  1. Plan ahead and Shop Wisely

With social distancing as the new normal, we know it’s best to stay home and go outside as little as possible. So figure out in advance what meals you would like to cook for the week ahead. Look up new recipes online or flip through your favorite cookbooks- like mine😊, Enjoying Food Peace: Recipes and Intuitive Eating Wisdom to Nourish Your Body and Mind, available on Amazon.

Once you have your menu, create a shopping list of all the ingredients you will need so you can get everything you need during one trip. And, don’t forget to take advantage of online grocery shopping!

  1. Prep your meals in advance

If you are working from home, it involves a lot of time and dedication, which makes cooking and eating balanced meals a challenge. Make one day, such as Saturday or Sunday, the day you cook all your meals for the week so you can ensure you will be nourishing your body consistently. Package the meals up in small sectioned containers, label them and freeze!

  1. Create a flexible eating schedule

Being stuck at home all day may feel like there is a lack of structure to your day. Each day seems to blend into the next and your appetite might be fluctuating. Consider setting up an eating schedule that is flexible, so you can make sure your body is getting the nutrition it needs while honoring your inner hunger and satiety signals. Yes, you can still eat intuitively when you have structure in place. The key is to make it flexible, and not rigid (which is what dieting is!)

Please know that it’s totally understandable if you are struggling with food and your eating right now. I hope these strategies can help you.

If there is anything you’d like to share with me, or if I can support you in any way, just click HERE to contact me!

Keep Your Eye Out For…

A brand-new training to help you end emotional eating.

I recently sent out a survey about your biggest food and eating challenges. If you haven’t yet completed the survey, you can do so here for one more day, until April 30, 2020! I’ll be sharing the results of a survey along with info on a new free training, so check back here in a few days so you don’t miss it!

Navigating Food and Body Challenges During the Pandemic

Trying to maintain a sense of semblance in these uncertain times can be challenging. I know it is for me. During the day, while I’m working remotely with my clients, my mind and thoughts are one hundred percent focused on supporting my clients. But when the evening falls and I wind down after a long day, I start to feel uneasy. The reports coming in with the latest stats on positive COVID-19 cases and unfortunate deaths sends chills up my spine and my heart and mind fill with worry.

I know I’m not alone. My clients have shared with me how challenging it is for them and I’m sure you feel it too. Being home all day has been bringing up food and body issues for many people. The biggest challenges I’m hearing are:

  • Challenge #1: “I’m finding it difficult to eat on a regular schedule.”
  • Challenge #2: “When I feel anxious or the worry gets too much to bear, I numb out with food. Only after, I feel worse.”
  • Challenge #3: “I find myself looking in the mirror all the time and cringe at what my body looks like. My desire to change my body is all I can think of now that I’m home.”

Here are some strategies you can try for each of these challenges:

Challenge #1: Haphazard eating

Solution: Create a flexible schedule of eating

The most important thing you can do for yourself is to take care of your basic needs, and that includes nourishment. Creating a flexible schedule for when you will eat meals and snacks will help you to fuel your body on a consistent basis.

Note that I said flexible. While I am a big proponent of allowing your body’s hunger signals to guide your eating versus eating by the clock, during times of stress your hunger signals might be blunted. Therefore, having a flexible schedule will allow you to be sure you are fueling yourself even if those signals can’t be relied on right now.

Challenge #2: Numbing out with food

Solution: Pause and determine what you really need

Sometimes it seems as if numbing out with food might be a good solution, so you don’t have to deal with the difficult emotions you are feeling. However, once your binge eating is over, you feel guilty, ashamed, and physically uncomfortable in addition to the original emotions that drove you to the food in the first place.

The best gift you can give yourself in this moment is to PAUSE. Before reaching for the food, hit the pause button and give yourself the space to consider what you are really feeling in that moment. It likely isn’t physical hunger, so what are you truly hungry for? Maybe it’s connection, especially in this time of self-isolation. Maybe it’s a needed rest. The worry of the coronavirus can be exhausting you and the fatigue can be driving you to the food.

Pausing and asking yourself what you are really feeling and what you really need will allow you to take the best care of yourself.

Challenge #3: Body worry

Solution: Appreciate your body as it is now and seek support

This might be asking a lot of you, to appreciate your body as it is right now. I realize that. We live in a culture that tells us the only way to have an acceptable body is to have a thin body. And you’ve been doing whatever you could over the years and decades to achieve that cultural expectation. Maybe you achieved it for a short time, but most likely you didn’t stay that size for long.

It’s not your fault either, contrary to what diet culture tells you. We all have a genetic blueprint of where our natural body size lies. Trying to change this is working against nature. The only thing that’s accomplished is creating a poor body image. This negative body image prevents you from living your life.

Is it easy to heal your body image? No!

Is it possible to heal your body image? Yes!

With the right support and guidance, you can heal. You are fully capable of cultivating a positive body image and learning how to handle difficult body image moments.

Join me and a small group of dedicated women who all want to heal their negative body image.

The Body Image Healing Program™ is a 12-week small group coaching program where you will:

  • Move from body hatred to body neutrality
  • Stop body bashing and body comparisons
  • Define your worth outside of your body
  • Learn how to navigate “bad body image moments” with self-compassion and kindness

To learn more and express your commitment – free interest, just click this LINK.

The investment for the program is now 50% off the regular investment to make it easier for you to get the support you need during the pandemic. The program begins April 20, 2020.

We all need support during this difficult time. Allow me to help you. Click HERE to learn more and express your commitment-free interest in The Body Image Healing Program™.

Busy woman eating at her desk

4 Triggers to a Challenging Food Day (and Strategies to Try)

You’ve been traveling along your intuitive eating journey and making progress. You remember that it’s not about perfection, instead it’s about learning and growing. You have done great work in rejecting the diet mentality and recognizing the diet culture messages that swarm all around you.

 

So why does food feel so difficult today? Why are you feeling blah in your body today?

 

The answer might very well lie in one of 4 triggers that I see often when working with clients.

 

Mindless eating

Do you find yourself eating without full attention to what or how much you are eating? This is mindless eating. You may go through your day not even realizing that you picked on the cake on the counter, ate from the chocolate bowl on your bosses’ desk, or popped several grapes in your mouth each time you passed through the kitchen.

 

When you engage in mindless eating, you are not eating to satisfy a physical hunger and at some point, you feel it in your body. Perhaps you feel sluggish, bloated, or tired. Then you blame the food and vow to be “good” the rest of the day (or tomorrow!).

 

Strategy to try: Call yourself out each time you find yourself engaging in mindless eating. Bring yourself back into the present moment and name the behavior. You will find, over time, that you are no longer mindlessly eating.

 

Distracted eating

Watching TV while you eat dinner? So many people do. This, however, is distracted eating and it prevents you from appreciating your meal, tuning in to your fullness signals and having full satisfaction.

You might tell me that eating while watching TV slows down your eating, and maybe it does. But it is still distracted eating and your body views distraction as stress which triggers the fight or flight response which effects your digestion and absorption of nutrients.

Looking at your cell phone, eating at your desk while working, reading or sending texts, and reading the newspaper, a book or the mail is also distracted eating.

 

Strategy to try: Make a commitment to yourself that you will not watch TV during dinner. If your spouse wants the TV on, calmly explain to him/her why it’s important to you that the TV be off. Do not bring your phone to the table, and save the reading for after dinner.

 

Lack of planning

I’ve said many times on my blog, in my videos and in Facebook Lives that planning is not dieting. That is, if you can roll with the punches and be flexible. If planning meals means you put pressure on yourself to “follow” the plan and if you “can’t”you break out in a sweat, then we should talk. That’s still dieting.

Without proper meal planning, you run the risk of grabbing food on the go, popping through the drive through, or maybe even skipping dinner and mindlessly snacking instead.

To me, as a busy working mom, I have to plan meals or my family (and me) won’t have food at the ready. So, think ahead to your week and what you might want to eat for dinners. Make a shopping list so you have the necessary ingredients on hand. Write out your plan if it helps and prep ahead as much as possible.

My freezer is really my best friend. I often cook extra and freeze for a future meal. I always think tonight about what I want to have tomorrow night so that when I get home from work (or my kids get home from school and I’m working late) there is a dinner ready to go.

Strategy to try: Plan a few dinners for the week ahead of time, go shopping to have the ingredients in the house and give thought to what you can prep ahead of time.

 

Emotional eating

You are human which means you have emotions! And yes, sometimes, you might consciously acknowledge that you’re feeling sad (fill in any emotion here) and a bowl of ice cream would really help you to feel better.

This in my opinion, is not of issue.

But when the first and only way you cope with difficult emotions is to turn to food, then this is an unhealthy behavior that needs to be addressed.

If you are having a challenging food day, give thought if perhaps you are using food to numb, sedate and distract you from some underlying emotions that you’d rather not feel.

Strategy to try: Seek support to help you identify your emotional eating triggers and learn how to customize your strategies to best cope with the emotions without turning to food. For more info on overcoming emotional eating, check this out!

 

As you look over the above triggers to a challenging food day, which do you resonate with most? Let me know below!

4 Ways to Incorporate Gentle Nutrition

After years of dieting you may feel like your life is ruled by food. The dieting mindset has taught you that food is meant to be consumed under strict guidelines without enjoyment. However, you probably realize now that this is just not true!

 

Remember back to when you were a child, there were so many exciting things to experience every day, and meals and snacks were just a part of the routine.  Day-to-day life was not driven by whether or not you ate the “right” or “wrong” foods.

 

When you focus too much on eating and dieting, food begins to control your life rather than being a part of your day.  You find yourself cancelling your lunch date with your friends because you’re afraid there will be nothing on the menu that you “can” eat. Following food rules to hopefully lose weight removes the pleasurable experiences from your life.

 

The good news is that when you finally give up dieting you do not need to follow external food rules anymore. When you start the intuitive eating journey  you learn how to eat based on your body’s hunger and fullness cues. And, when you rely on your body’s signals, you enjoy each and every eating experience.

 

The concept of “Gentle Nutrition” can be confusing for you. In truth, if you are still dismantling diet culture messages that have flooded your mind, you may not be ready to learn how to incorporate nutrition into your journey in a gentle way. And that’s okay. Your time will come. But if you are ready, then here are some gentle ways for you to do so from a lens of self-care!

 

4 Tips to Incorporate Gentle Nutrition

 

1. Start Your Day with Breakfast

When you wake up in the morning, your body calls for fuel. If you ignore this call, you will likely overeat later in the day. Instead of focusing on food as a tool for weight loss, focus on it as a tool for fueling your body to get your day started. As a past dieter, you likely skipped breakfast because you either claimed you weren’t hungry or that it caused you to eat more throughout the day. On the contrary, when you skip breakfast, you set yourself up to be overly hungry which then leads to overeating. Enjoy a hearty nutritious breakfast such as oatmeal with fruit and nuts or a veggie omelet in a whole grain tortilla.  You will see how much energy you have to start your day and will find you are not “starving” by lunchtime.

 

2. Be Prepared – Bring Healthy Snacks with You

If you approach mealtime feeling ravenous, you may eat beyond comfortable fullness to the point that you feel stuffed and sick. When you begin to feel the first signals of hunger, the only way to answer that call is to eat, which you can only do if you have food with you. This is the reason why I always carry some snacks when I leave the house and I recommend you do too. Having snacks on hand will prevent you from making a trip to the vending machine and can even save you some money.

 

3. Be Creative with Produce

If you’ve been a dieter, you have probably had your fill of fruits and veggies. Maybe so much so that you avoid them at this point (“carrot sticks, no thanks!”) Do a quick audit of the food you eat in a day. If you’re falling short on produce, then you are falling short on valuable nutrients and antioxidants for good health. Instead of reluctantly adding steamed broccoli to your menu, get creative. Make a spinach lasagna, stuffed peppers or a roasted eggplant salad.

 

For more recipes and intuitive eating wisdom, check out this resource!

 

4. Approach Your Meal with Positivity

By making food a positive force in your life, you will end that unhappy relationship you’ve had with food and be on the road to optimal health and wellness. Approach each meal as an opportunity to show respect to your body. Keeping the intuitive eating principles (https://dietfreeradiantme.com/intuitive-eating-for-adults/) top of mind will ensure you have full satisfaction in your meals.

 

What is one food rule you might still be holding onto that is preventing you from enjoying gentle nutrition for your health.