Nourish With Intent: Intro To Intuitive Eating

Good morning. Happy Saturday to all my Cadre friends. Welcome to Nourish With Intent. I hope I'll give a couple seconds for people to pop in here. I'm excited to be able to see your comments again. We had a little bug and now I'll get to actually see all of your lovely responses and know who's in here. Today I wanted to kind of regroup and restructure a little bit how I go about my weekly lives. So today will be the first of really diving into intuitive eating as a whole. So my plan is to kind of go back and forth each week between one of the principles of intuitive eating and then maybe kind of a hot topic that I'm seeing or if you guys have questions, specific topics you want me to talk about and you want to learn more about, kind of bounce between the two of those.

Good morning, Mom. Good to have you here. And I can see that you're here. It's so exciting. If you haven't spent time with me before, this is your first time joining me. My name is Kristen. I'm a registered dietitian. I live in Denver, and I specialize in eating disorders, disordered eating, and intuitive eating. Intuitive eating is something that I use in a treatment with a lot of my clients, but I also think it's just really beneficial for humans to get back to what we know about ourselves rather than listening to the noise around us.

So that's what today is. Today is really just an introduction, potentially to spark some conversation. So if you have any questions, let me know. It is finally a fall day here. So tell me your favorite fall activity in the chat. Okay, so what is intuitive eating? You've heard me talk about it before. You maybe have seen it. You maybe have seen people criticizing it. I really just want to take today to give a brief overview. Intuitive eating is not a diet. It is the opposite of a diet. There are no rules.

There's no guidelines. There's no nothing to do wrong like there is in many traditional diet programs. The goal of it is to make you the expert in your own body and your own experiences rather than relying on someone else. And that's because that random guy on the Internet making up some diet that maybe he's doing because he feels really good eating. That way he doesn't know anything about you or your experiences or your life or your, you know, emotional experiences as well. One of the criticisms I think intuitive eating gets is that, well, if I just follow intuitive eating and listen to what I want to eat, I'll never eat Any sort of fruits or vegetables again, or I can't eat intuitively because I maybe have IBS and can't eat certain fodmap foods, or I'm celiac or you know, enter whatever.

Intuitive eating doesn't go against eating a specific way if your body is requiring it. Respecting your body is one of the ten principles of intuitive eating. So they can go hand in hand. The difference is, are we following a specific way of eating and maybe not eating specific foods because of it's, it's changing the intention, it's changing the way we view it. It's moving towards, I'm eating this way, I'm nourishing my body, I'm treating my body with love and respect rather than punishment, if that makes sense.

Intuitive eating is different in and of itself than mindfulness, but it does call on a lot of mindfulness practices. And it's actually one of the best ways I found to help people start the process of intuitive eating. Some of the tools of mindfulness, when you are wanting to begin implementing this process in your life, add a meal. Taking each meal as a new experience, a new isolated moment. And take a deep breath, Notice how your body feels before you start eating. Notice what you're feeling, what emotions you're feeling before you start eating.

Are you feeling overwhelmed because you just got in from running a million errands? Or maybe you have kids who are screaming and throwing things or all the things but taking a moment to sit down and slow down so that you can begin to reconnect with what are you feeling in your body? Where are you feeling it, physical or emotional? It's really taking the time to listen to your body's feedback and relink with all of those cues. And from there we can notice trends. We can start to notice why you make decisions around food and look at that, how to shift the way you think about those decisions around food.

And if all of that sounds really frou frou, which it's meant to, because this is a framework really developed to support psychological health. So it will likely feel uncomfortable for a lot of people, but it's also scientifically backed. There have been, I think it's close to 200 studies now, quite a few. And intuitive eating has been linked to lower cholesterol, including LDL and triglycerides, lower blood pressure, lower body dissatisfaction. So improved body image, decreased bingeing, increased nutrient dense food intake.

So a lot of people assume if I eat whatever I want, I'll never eat those quote unquote healthy foods, right? The fruits and vegetables, the things that are nutrient dense. And we actually see the opposite in that research. Increase motivation and joy coming from movement rather than viewing movement as punishment and overall just increased life satisfaction. So there's a lot of benefits to going back to listening to yourself and your own body rather than all the noise around us at any given time.

And the goal really is approaching and experiencing the act of eating through curiosity, not judgment, responding with self compassion rather than self deprecation. So that's my spiel for you on this Saturday, a little bit of Intro to Intuitive Eating. If you enjoyed that, you want to come back and learn more. Two weeks from now we'll start diving into the principles and really try to help you guys apply it as much as I can, not knowing everyone personally, but really going into depth of each principle, how you can incorporate it into your own life, what that might look like and any questions you have, I'll make a post in the community tab.

You can drop them there. Otherwise that's all I've got for you today. I hope you all have a warm weekend. It's a little chilly here and get some rest and recovery and I will see you all back here next week. Saturday same time.