Three pillars to a beautiful relationship with food

I used to struggle with my eating...terribly. So much so, that I assumed that my challenges with eating would punctuate my life through each passing decade.

It was a disheartening, demoralizing feeling.

As you might suspect, there is a "happy ending" here. My relationship with food is remarkably healthier (think less extremes, more calm, less overthinking, more flexibility, solid eating habits, stable body weight, etc...) than I ever would have imagined it could be when I was struggling so much.

Considering my own path and my experience working with many clients over the years, I've tracked three key "pillars" that helps women have a much better (dare I say, beautiful) relationship with food. Here they are:

Healing Eating Pillars for Women

 #1. Nutritional know-how

This includes solid, time-tested strategies with eating that include food quality, macronutrient balance, pleasure physiology, and rhythmic eating. This is often the "practical" side of things, that when women learn, sets their mind and body at ease.

#2. Body awareness

This includes the critical invitation toward embodiment (of being in and fully feeling the body), understanding and leveraging the physiological relaxation response, learning to shift overwhelm out of the body, and eating to the point of energy

#3. Healing what underlies chronic dieting, binge eating, and overeating This includes working with perfectionism (a protective strategy) and softening black-and-white thinking, caring for/being with emotional discomfort or pain (yes, you have a history that impacted you just like every other human), untangling unrealistic goals, and honoring your personal growth path

Whole Healing

Many women spend years and years trying to master pillar #1, collecting more and more and more dietary information but paying little attention to pillars #2 and #3.

Listen up if that it you.

When women JUST focus on nutrition information, underlying perfectionism can hijack and derail the whole thing.

And when women exclusively focus on "healthy eating," they may still overeat the healthiest of foods because they never learned to feel anything below the neck.

What I'm saying is there are limitations in just focusing on "being healthy."

I am confident though, when these three pillars are embraced, your eating can transform and you can feel far more skilled, compassionate, and relaxed about your eating.  

Wishing you a beautiful Fall season!

With love & respect,

Laura

__________

To inquire about one-on-one eating psychology support, reach me here to check on availability.

To inquire about my 3-month eating psychology case study group - yay- that starts this month (October) reach me here.

To inquire about IFS therapy and transpersonal psychology, contact me here.