recipes Archives - Diet Free Radiant Me | Intuitive Eating | Emotional Eating

How to Build an Intuitive Kitchen

For many chronic dieters, the kitchen is a source of pain for a few reasons. First, when you’ve been dieting, chances are you were eating foods you believed you “should” eat, or that you were told to it, and not necessarily foods you wanted to eat.

How many times would you make a meal for your family, only to be eating something different?

What comes to mind for me is Pizza night! The family is eating pizza, but you are eating salmon and salad, not that there’s anything wrong with salmon and salad, of course. Its’ just that you really wanted the pizza (or lasagna, mac and cheese, burgers and fries etc.) but didn’t allow yourself to eat it.

Now that you are on your Intuitive Eating journey, things are different! You’re learning to give yourself unconditional permission to eat, but the problem is, you don’t really know what to eat.

The Importance of Bringing Intuitive Eating into the Kitchen

A big part of the Intuitive Eating journey is to have new experiences with food as you rebuild trust in yourself and the food choices you make.

1. Bringing Intuitive Eating into the kitchen gives you the opportunity to heal your relationship with food and continue to learn and grow using curiosity, self-discovery, and self-compassion. It also allows you to break free from the diet culture rules and reframe thoughts around food and meal preparation.

For example, instead of the kitchen being a place of fear with lots of unsatisfying meals, boring meal prep, and only “safe” ingredients”, the kitchen can now be a place for exploration, experimentation, and satisfaction!

2. By bringing all ingredients into the kitchen again, you learn to neutralize them as you create new and exciting dishes. In this way, you learn what your true food preferences are (which are often lost while dieting), and you may just discover something new that you enjoy too!

3. Being intuitive in the kitchen while cooking allows you to be more present moment to moment with the cooking process and can enhance satisfaction when you sit down to eat your creation.

How to Build an Intuitive Kitchen

As an Intuitive Eater, you trust that when you walk into the kitchen, you will have what you need to put together a satisfying meal. One of principles of Intuitive Eating is Discover the Satisfaction Factor. To do this, you explore all the sensual qualities of food to learn your true food preferences. Yet, it’s hard to do this if your pantry is not stocked with a variety of ingredients.

Stocking Your Kitchen

Stocking your kitchen with a variety of foods in the pantry, freezer, and fridge allows you to have the security and comfort of knowing that a tasty, satisfying meal is always available within arm’s reach.

A well-stocked kitchen causes less stress around food; meals can be created easily with what is available in the kitchen.

No rigid meal plan necessary
No long cooking times
No stress or panic about ingredients or items running out

One of my goals is to have a variety of (and enough) ingredients to create a great “throw together” nourishing meal at any time, and to be able to open my cookbook and make a recipe that I desire in that moment without having to run out for an ingredient.

Here are some ideas to get you started in stocking your kitchen:

Pantry

Pasta, all kinds and shapes
Grains, such as barley, quinoa, and rice
Oats and oatmeal
Canned tuna, salmon, sardines
Canned beans
Canned tomatoes and tomato sauces
Flour
Oils
Vinegars
Dried fruits
Nuts and nut butters
Spices and dried herbs
Tortilla chips
Sweeteners
Onions and garlic
Potatoes

Refrigerator

Eggs
Milk
Yogurt
Cheese
Orange juice
Lemons and limes
Condiments such as salad dressing, mayonnaise etc.

Freezer

Frozen meals
Frozen fruits
Frozen vegetables
Veggie burgers
Frozen French fries or tater tots
Bread
Ice cream

Add to this list as you think about what types of foods you can’t wait to try.

Get Creative

Now that you have your kitchen stocked, what do you want to cook? That’s often a hard question for chronic dieters as they are allowing all foods back into their lives.

Take some time to ask yourself “what do I really want to eat.” Then, pull out a recipe and your ingredients and take the time to enjoy every step of the cooking process. As you are dicing the tomatoes, take in the sweet aroma, listen as the onions and peppers as they are sizzling in the pan, and try to use every one of your senses to get the most enjoyment! This will further enhance the pleasure when you finally eat what you’ve created.

Need inspiration? Check out my cookbook: Enjoying Food Peace: Intuitive Eating Wisdom to Nourish Your Body and Mind. There are over 150 recipes that will help you bring the satisfaction and pleasure back into eating.

Grab your copy on Amazon!

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

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!

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!

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!

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.

Why I Wrote My Book, Enjoying Food Peace (Coming Soon)

For years I’ve been helping clients and patients make the changes necessary to live a healthier life. I’ve enjoyed every minute of it, it’s an amazing feeling to hear from a client how I’ve impacted them in a positive way.

Yes, I make a difference and I help people. Man, this feels good.

But one day it occurred to me. While many of my clients were making lifelong changes, there was a group of individuals who were struggling. After digging deeper, I realized why.

These wonderful and caring individuals were not at peace with food or their bodies. They were striving to live up to society’s standards of the “thin ideal” and would do anything to achieve this unreasonable goal, all the while being miserable. They were eating foods that they thought they should eat, and not foods they loved. And, if they ate something they loved, they often felt guilty afterwards telling themselves “now I’m going to gain weight.”

If you’re here reading my blog, I imagine you resonate with what I’m talking about. Food is not something to be feared, food is to be enjoyed. Yet, too many people in this world are brainwashed to believe that there are “good-for-you” foods and “bad-for-you” foods and it wreaks havoc on their lives.

Labeling Food

Good/bad, healthy/unhealthy, legal/illegal etc. It doesn’t matter what label you give food, just the fact that you put a label on a food is elevating some foods and demonizing others.

Of course, there are some foods that are more nutrient-rich than others, I don’t argue that. But there is a purpose for all foods. Some foods fuel you and some foods give you great taste pleasure. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Making Peace with Food

I’ve been in private practice for over 30 years! I’ve seen a lot of people lose weight and regain that weight plus more through some form of dieting. It was time for them to stop relying on what others told them to eat and start to eat what they truly wanted.

So, for the last 8 years I’ve helped chronic dieters and emotional eaters make peace with food through my Intuitive Eating Program. Once the food fear was gone, they were able to enjoy all types of foods made in all types of ways from all types of cuisine. They truly recaptured the pleasures of eating.

Enjoying Food Peace Was Born

I wanted this peace for people all over the world that were struggling with their food. So, I decided to write a cookbook called, Enjoying Food Peace: Recipes and Intuitive Eating Wisdom to Nourish Your Body and Mind.

Get a sneak peek here!

This book is not just for chronic dieters looking for food peace. It’s also for people who are obsessed with “eating healthy” to the point where they have cut out major food groups or nutrients and have just a small selection of foods they feel safe eating. It’s a segue back to balanced eating.

Enjoying Food Peace is also for everyone who enjoys a good meal.

It’s taken me 6 years to write this book! I put together an amazing team of nutrition interns who helped test the recipes. We met every Tuesday in my test kitchen to taste the foods that were prepared that week. Then we would evaluate and critique. “It needs a little more of that, a little less of this, ah, it’s perfect!”

The Wisdoms

After completing the recipes and putting together the book, I felt I wanted to add more. One night it came to me…write a chapter introducing intuitive eating and share some “Intuitive Eating Wisdoms” throughout the book. So, that’s exactly what I did! Not only will the recipes nourish your body, but the wisdoms will nourish your mind.

The creative genius and photographer behind the design of the book and the color photos you’ll see inside is my amazing assistant Samantha Baturin. This book would not be coming to life if it wasn’t for Samantha! I am forever grateful to her!!

Enjoying Food Peace provides the reader with over 150 tasty recipes and Intuitive Eating Wisdom to eat what you love, without a side of guilt.

I hope you’re as excited as I am for March 20^th launch day! Keep your eyes peeled so you can get your copy!

In the meantime, here’s a sneak peek at what’s inside Enjoying Food Peace (free recipe included!).

Cooking and Intuitive Eating

Do you love to cook? Do you take the time to prepare what you love? As a past dieter (I’m hoping by now you are on your way to saying that!), consider how you decided what you were going to cook for dinner. More than likely it was what the “diet menu” dictated for the night. If you didn’t like the choice, I bet you still made it because to deviate from the menu would mean you “broke your diet”.

So think about it. When you were dieting, and you cooked what you were told to cook, did you really enjoy it? Did you derive great satisfaction from it? I have many clients who are wonderful cooks, and unfortunately stopped cooking when they were on the diet rollercoaster. It was too tempting to cook “something really good” and not be able to eat it.

Now think about the last yummy meal you cooked as an intuitive eater. You took the time to figure out what you really wanted to eat, you pulled out a favorite family recipe or opened up a new cookbook, and took the time to prepare what you wanted. How did you feel?

I have been working on writing my next cookbook which, although is not yet titled, will incorporate the principles of intuitive eating. I have had so much fun creating and testing new recipes. As an intuitive eater, it has opened my mind and my meal options to so many delicious foods that as a past dieter, I would not have eaten.

By taking the time to ask yourself what you want to eat, and taking the time to prepare that food, you will feel more satisfied, more in tune with your internal signals and more nourished.

It doesn’t have to be anything complicated. It can be a simple sandwich, a plate of vegetable crudité with hummus, or if you are feeling adventurous, a three-course meal. The key is to approach it from an intuitive eating standpoint and find ways to make cooking an enjoyable part of your life.

Your turn to take action: Ask yourself what you really want to eat for dinner tonight. Take the time to prepare and enjoy it. Let me know how this experience was for you.

Tag Archive for: recipes