The Intuitive Eating Process - What working with me looks like

If you’re someone TIRED of feeling bad about themselves, TIRED of missing out on foods you enjoy and TIRED of feeling out of control around food - I see you! You’ll also want to continue reading because this post is for you.

Intuitive Eating is a way of eating which is guided by you and your body. It’s listening to your hunger and fullness to respect your body’s need and response of food, it’s listening to what foods you and your body want and satisfying those wants, and eventually doing all that without the negative feelings of guilt, shame or self-hatred. However, the process to getting there is not short. Consider the years of dieting, negative-messaging you’ve absorbed throughout your life and the deep impact it all had on your perspective and relationship with health - that’s a lot to unpack and re-train. Consider pregnancy as an example. You spend 9 months growing a person inside you - your organs move, your bones move, your blood volume changes, and at the end you have to squeeze a person out or have major surgery to have them removed from your body. That’s a lot of changes that occurred to your body, and you’ll need a lot of time for your body to heal and form its new shape. So this won’t be an easy fix or a 6-week plan - we’ll be doing a lot of unpacking, reflecting, and trial and error.

The process is different for everybody because everyone has their own trauma and patterns to unpack. Also, this process may change, grow and adapt over the years, so this is a light outline to give you a clue on what to expect when working with me.

The 15 minute Discovery Call - we’ll discuss why you’ve reached out, why you want help and what your expectations are from me, our consultations and what you’ll achieve. We’ll then make a plan for the frequency you’d like to talk with me and make sure we have a plan outlined.

Our First Consultation - Before the consultation, you’ll be asked to fill our a questionnaire on your relationship with food (this can be done during the consultation if you need support). It’ll give us both a start point of where you’re at and perspective of how much work there is to do. We’ll also discuss family history, your health and other things to ensure your safety. Now to the good part - we’ll talk about the Principles of Intuitive Eating and what they are and how we’ll get you through each stage.

Our Next Consultations - We’ll work through each principle, ensuring you’ve completely tackled it before moving onto the next one. We’ll do frequent check-ins with questionnaires to ensure progress is being made. It may be that sometimes you find yourself struggling with a previous principle and we need to temporarily revisit it - this isn’t failure, it’s the normal process of growth. You’ll be given various resources with each principle to continue the work between our consultations. We’ll approach everything with curiosity, not judgement. During the first few principles, your eating will begin to look different. Concerns over the “healthfulness” of the foods you eat may occur, often time because during this time we begin reintroducing foods you’ve previously avoided or restricted. You may find yourself eating quite differently from the way you expect to be. You may be eating past fullness sometimes, or sometimes not enough, or sometimes at times you’re not that hungry at all - all of this is normal. It’s the process of getting those hunger and fullness cues back. Learning to listen to those cues takes practice. As we move through the principles, you’ll find yourself settling in to your new way of eating, listening to your body more intently and responding to it without negative feelings.

Then, once we’ve reached a point where you have gained the skills you need to maintain the principles in your everyday life, we set you free for some time. This could be a couple weeks, a month , or two - all depending on you. You’ll be asked to keep a short journal during this time and when we next speak again, we’ll check in with you and how you’ve been. It’s like a trial run. If anything came up that we need to look over again then we’ll do that. And once we’ve done that, and you feel confident enough you can give another try, we’ll do that again until you come back with no more need for support.

You’ll always be able to book a consultation with me if in the future you need a check-in and support again. I’ll never leave you abandoned, the door will always be open to you!

I hope this post has given you a rough picture of what working with me through the Intuitive Eating principles looks like. It may seem like an investment into yourself, but just think, you’ll never fall for a scam program or the false sense of good vs bad foods ever again! You’ll gain life-long skills to live happily in your body. Book your 15 Minute Discovery Call here to start your journey.