Many women I talk to just want to learn how to heal nagging problem areas around eating, feel their best, and move on with their lives...but haven't yet found a sustainable way to do it.
Confident eating, as I'm sure you know, isn't just an attitude or manic attempt to log every calorie into a food app for the rest of your life. It's not a matter of brute will nor is it achieved by reciting daily one-liner positive affirmations. It's not achieved by a nutritional spiritual bypass of sorts, only focused on purity, perfection, or extraordinary accomplishment.
Feeling confident with eating has layers that are utterly human, addressing what it's really like to be you in your life. If a person only clings to ideals or perfection, I notice eating habits don't tend to change long-term because human imperfection inevitably shows up and "ruins" the whole plan.
With no space for the human side of things, eating can take on it's own kind of frustrating drama.
This is like the woman who tries to plan everything perfectly out on paper...then someone brings bagels to the office. Or the woman who is still trying to lose "the last 5 lbs, and is hungry at 8pm, when she feels she should be fasting.
Drama.
If you really want to make some headway with your eating and well-being, it's worth taking a look at 8 layers I've tracked and supported women with over the years that contribute to confident eating. You'll see very practical layers, emotional layers, and even spiritual layers here.
Practical
1.) Learning how to set up your eating successfully so you eat well at home, at work, while traveling, and when socializing and
trouble-shoot problem areas
2.) Learning how different kinds of foods, meals, and quantities actually make you feel
3.) Learning nutritional skills for appetite regulation and body weight regulation
Emotional
4.) Healing painful eating habits like chronic dieting, binge eating, restriction, over eating, or other forms of "self sabotage"
5.) Detaching feelings of self worth to personal appearance alone
6.) Healing personal and cultural wounds and trauma related to the body and eating
Spiritual
7.) Understanding your most natural way of being in the world, your temperament, deep values, yeses and nos, belief in yourself and your resilience, forgiveness, and personal initiations in your life
8.) Connecting to a deeper, spiritual center of orientation to meet human desire for beauty, ecstatic states, ritual, and love
I'm really not holding back here. If your eating is challenged or suffering, these areas that hold powerful keys for healing and change. I don't expect every person to resonate equally with each area, but this is often where the action is to different degrees.
I hope you find this list a helpful way for you to take inventory of your own eating "hot spots."
Love,
Laura