“Intuitive Eating aims to help us repair our relationship with food by giving us the tools needed to tune in with our bodies and minds. Not only can we learn to better identify and attend to our needs, but we can also learn to disengage from unhelpful messages that negatively impact our self esteem.”
We all have a relationship with food. Perhaps we find food nurturing and comforting when times are tough. We may use food to distract ourselves from undesirable tasks or conversations we dread having. Some of us may fear eating the “wrong” food because we’ve been told that it will make us unhealthy or cause us to gain weight. Many of us spend hours of the day ruminating over thoughts about what to eat and how our bodies look.
In an effort to emulate unachievable body goals and beauty standards found all over the media, we might turn to dieting.
“The cycle of chronic dieting can complicate our relationship with food more than it helps us achieve a desirable weight,” says Jordan Castonguay, Licensed Mental Health Counselor and Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor.
“The cycle of binge-eating often starts with an individual wanting to lose weight and restricting the amount of calories or type of food they eat. This often leads to intense cravings, followed by overeating or binge eating, and resulting in feelings of shame and guilt,” says Jordan.
To break free from the chains of diet culture and the barrage of distorted body image messages, which often result in unhealthy eating habits, we can turn to Intuitive Eating.
What is Intuitive Eating?
Intuitive Eating is a self-care eating framework created by dietitians, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch in 1995. It aims to help us repair our relationship with food by giving us the tools needed to tune in with our bodies and minds. Not only can we learn to better identify and attend to our needs, but we can also learn to disengage from unhelpful messages that negatively impact our self esteem.
“Intuitive Eating is not a paradigm for weight loss,” says Jordan. “For those of us who’ve attempted to control our weight, without honoring our signals for hunger and fullness, the Intuitive Eating model can help us recognize and reframe food-restrictive thoughts which prevent us from knowing how and when to eat.”
Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor, Jordan Castonguay
In the following article, we’ll hear from Jordan Castonguay, Licensed Mental Health Counselor, Eye-Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Certified Therapist, and Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor who specializes in Intuitive Eating, eating disorders, body image, anxiety, perfectionism, and trauma. Jordan offers online Intuitive Eating Counseling to clients throughout Massachusetts.
How does intuitive eating reshape our wellbeing?
There’s a strong emphasis on Interoceptive Awareness within the Intuitive Eating framework, which is the ability to notice, understand, and respond to physical sensations in our body.
Signs of hunger, thirst, aches, and pain sound simple to identify, but chronic dieting and disordered eating can lead us to de-value and lose trust in our body sensations.
Intuitive Eating focuses on listening to our bodies internal cues, rather than following strict diets or meal plans. It’s about trusting our body’s inner wisdom and honoring our signs of hunger and fullness.
Applying the 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating in Therapy
Here’s how the 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating can help you cultivate a healthier relationship with food, body, and mind.
- Reject the Diet Mentality
In therapy, rejecting the diet mentality involves helping clients to develop strategies that minimize their exposure to weight loss content. This might include throwing out the diet plans and unfollowing accounts on social media that promote intentional weight loss.
Clients will learn to recognize the food-restrictive thoughts that may be unintentionally blocking them from consciously eating and feeling physically and emotionally satisfied.
- Honor Your Hunger
Working on this principle with clients involves helping them to improve their ability to identify and respond to biological signals of hunger to ensure their body is adequately nourished. This is where clients will learn about interoceptive awareness which sets the stage for trusting ourselves and food.
- Make Peace with Food
Making peace with food involves giving ourselves unconditional permission to eat. When we tell ourselves we can’t eat a certain food, it can lead us to experience intense feelings of deprivation that build into uncontrollable cravings, and result in binge eating.
Working on this principle in therapy involves teaching clients that they don’t need to justify their food choices to themselves or others. This also may involve addressing some underlying beliefs that are holding them back in that area.
- Discover the Satisfaction Factor
In our efforts to keep up with the latest dieting-trends and achieve thinness, we often overlook the pleasure and satisfaction found in eating. In therapy, this involves rediscovering the pleasure that helps us to feel physically and emotionally satisfied.
- Feel Your Fullness
Feeling our fullness involves learning how to identify our body signals that tell us when we are hungry and when we are full. We can learn to pause in the middle of eating to ask ourselves how the food tastes and how full we are.
- Challenge the Food Police
The food police represents all of the thoughts in our head that declare we’re “good” for eating certain foods and “bad” for eating others. It’s the voice that monitors all the unreasonable rules and regulations that diet culture has created.
This principle can be applied by teaching clients the process of cognitive restructuring as well as some cognitive defusion techniques to help them improve their ability to disengage from unhelpful thought patterns.
- Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness
It’s extremely common for us to use food as a way of coping with difficult emotions or escaping from threatening situations. However, when food is the only coping mechanism that is being used, it can become maladaptive.
This principle involves helping clients to develop additional coping strategies so they have a variety of options available to them when they are feeling emotionally dysregulated.
- Respect Your Body
We’ll learn how to accept and respect our bodies no matter what size they are. It can be difficult to reject diet mentality when we’re overly critical and controlling of our body size and shape. All bodies deserve dignity and respect.
- Movement—Feel the Difference
Clients will learn how to shift their focus away from regimented, calorie-burning exercises, and focus on how it feels to move their bodies.
This may involve helping clients to identify the benefits associated with exercise that don’t involve shrinking their body and identifying forms of movement that feel good for them.
- Honor Your Health—Gentle Nutrition
Clients will reach a point where they’re able to approach nutrition with a flexible mindset. The goal of Intuitive Eating is progress, not perfection.
What counts is that we’re learning to make food choices that honor our health without adhering to any hard and fast rules.
Who can benefit from Intuitive Eating?
The Intuitive Eating model applies to everybody, in every shape and size.
Those of us who are complex trauma survivors may have become disconnected from our internal cues for hunger, fullness, or pain as a way of coping with situations that we are unable to escape from.
The emphasis of interoceptive awareness in the intuitive eating approach can help us reconnect with our internal cues and therefore regain the mind-body connection that was lost.
Many of us who struggle with low self-esteem may reclaim our confidence and autonomy by learning how to identify and attend to our needs, and also how to disengage from our judgmental internal dialogue.
Those of us who are on medications for various mental health conditions, such as ADHD, may find that medications suppress our appetite. We may feel caught up in a pattern of not eating all day because of our suppressed appetite and then binge eating at nighttime when the medication wears off.
We can learn to practice mindfulness to tune into our body’s signals, even if these cues feel a bit inconsistent at times.
Ultimately, Intuitive Eating is about learning to trust that our body knows what it needs.
Start working with Jordan Castonguay, Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor today:
If you’re tired of constantly worrying about how and when to eat, needing to feel a sense of control with food, having unrealistically high expectations of yourself, and trying to motivate yourself through shame and criticism, then it might be time to turn to Intuitive Eating.
Jordan Castonguay is here to offer support and guidance as you navigate through the challenges, and heal your relationship with food, your body, and yourself.
Through learning and applying the Intuitive Eating framework, you will begin to respect your body and find kindness within yourself, free from diet mentality and self judgment.
To start working with Jordan online, please contact us today at (413) 343-4357.
About The Author
Nettie Hoagland
