Intuitive Eating Coaching: What Is It, Is It Right For You and How It Can Help You Sustain Healthy Habits With Ease
By now, you might’ve heard about Intuitive Eating, but maybe you’re not entirely sure what it entails, what working with an Intuitive Eating Coach is like, and who can benefit from it. I’m going to dive into all of that for you today in the event that you’ve been curious and want to learn more about what it’s like and whether it’s the right fit for you.
But before moving forward any further, it’s important that you know what intuitive eating is.
What is Intuitive Eating?
I have two awesome ways you can learn more about intuitive eating:
And if you’re like me, and don’t always like to be hyperlinked elsewhere, I’ll just give you the scoop.
In short, intuitive eating is an eating style that honours each individual’s unique preferences and needs, while promoting a healthy attitude towards food and body image.
While intuitive eating is extremely beneficial for people who have experienced disordered eating, or are currently in the throes of disordered eating, intuitive eating is an eating style suitable to everyone – because, guess what? We were all born intuitive eaters! We were all born with innate cues to eat when we’re hungry, and stop when we’re full; to gravitate towards foods that we enjoy, and reject foods that we don’t. Then diet culture came along and fed us a bunch of lies that we can’t trust our bodies, despite the fact that our bodies are brilliant beings that can procreate humans on their own.
As an Intuitive Eating Coach, I help people to reconnect with the innate wisdom of their body; the trust that it knows what it needs to thrive and what foods to turn to in order to satisfy it and feel good, which, at times, might look like, say more carbohydrates than other times – and that’s okay.
Why Intuitive Eating Coaching Is Needed If You Want To Reach & Sustain Healthy Habits
You may or may not know that I’m a Certified Holistic Nutritionist. At one point at the peak of my nutritionist career, I knew A LOT about health and nutrition. And yet, I felt further from a picture of health than ever.
I constantly felt guilty if I ate a non-nutrient dense food.
I obsessed about food and health SO much that it consumed my every thought.
I felt like I was “bad” if I didn’t eat “perfectly”.
And, it didn’t take long into my nutrition coaching practice to realize, many people felt the same way.
After that, I pivoted and became an Intuitive Eating Coach, because I believe that we need to address our relationship with food first before looking at nutrition.
Because here’s the thing: there’s no shortage of health & nutrition information out there, and yet, people are more confused than ever about how to eat and live healthily.
It’s clear that the reason why people aren’t reaching their health goals isn’t because they don’t know enough. I would argue it’s due to the following:
Humans are highly emotional beings
We’re ignoring the fact that we are highly emotional beings with varying needs and coping mechanisms that will be played out in food. Take emotional eating for example, a coping mechanism most of us learned from a young age to soothe emotions like sadness or anger, rather than learning how to sit with uncomfortable emotions.
All it takes is one stressful event at work, or in your relationship, or at home with your family to be set off and want to turn to food. No amount of nutrition information and logic can help you at that point and this is one of the many possible reasons why you are constantly straying from your diet or healthy lifestyle plan. Unless you’ve been taught how to sit with those uncomfortable emotions, it’s more than likely you’ll turn to food in that moment, particularly a carbohydrate or fat-rich food (you know, the ones we tend to feel the most guilty about) because they’re the foods that provide us with the fastest hit of feel-good dopamine.
Assuming that we can simply say “eat this, not that” in order to be healthy and expect flawless results is unrealistic, and if a practitioner is making recommendations to you for therapeutic healing purposes, it should be suited to your needs and lifestyle as opposed to a one-size-fits-all approach, which brings me to my next point …
2. Humans have very individual needs
There’s a lot of diets and ways of eating marketed out there, but there aren’t enough personally suited for the 8+ billion people on our planet.
Well, actually there is – but it’s not going to be found in a nutrition textbook, magazine or book. That’s because, only each of those 8+ billion people on the planet know what way of eating is best suited towards them, because we as humans, have very individual, unique needs.
This is, again, why intuitive eating coaching is needed. Because once an Intuitive Eating Coach helps you to see how following diets and healthy lifestyle plans aren’t serving you, we’ll work with you to find out what way of eating does make you feel your best. I always say to my Intuitive Way For Eating clients, the goal is to find “The _________ (insert your name here) Intuitive Way Of Eating”.
The benefit of having done various diets and healthy lifestyle plans is that you generally know what style of eating, and certain foods that make you thrive. That’s what an Intuitive Eating Coach will help you to identify within yourself, and how to stock your cupboards to support. I’m telling you, there’s no better feeling than looking in your fridge, freezer and cupboards and seeing a bunch of foods that light you up and make you excited. You can almost always guarantee I have Thai-inspired ingredients in my home because it’s my favourite cuisine that I’m almost always in the mood for and I find it super satisfying!
3. How humans engage with food is very psychological
On top of helping you stray from diet culture, learn how to listen to your innate hunger cues and discover what foods make you feel good, and which foods don’t, an Intuitive Eating Coach will also help you to get to the root as to what is driving your behaviour around food.
This is the part that I think most people overlook, or don’t realize, when exploring intuitive eating. But it’s true – and I’ll do it almost right from the beginning. In the Initial Consultation of The Intuitive Way For Eating, my one-on-one coaching program, I make it my mission to get to know everything about my client. I’ll ask questions like:
Do you work? If so, what do you do? Do you enjoy it?
What do you do for fun? Do you make time to actually do those things?
What are your parents like? What their parents (your grandparents) like? How did they talk about food and bodies in the home growing up?
Do you have siblings? If so, how many? How did your placement amongst your siblings make you feel?
What are your beliefs around health? Around weight? When did you first learn those beliefs?
As you can tell, none of these questions have to do with food itself, but they will 100% impact the way you engage with food, and help me to understand someone’s never-ending, obsessive constant pursuit of health.
What I often uncover through these questions, and by digging deep with my clients, is that there was a belief that was engrained early on in their life that was projected by a parent or a love source that made them believe they needed to act, or look a certain way. When that projection is coming from a parent or love source, love no longer feels unconditional, because now you have to work for it. You need to weigh a certain amount or less, or look a certain way in order to get love, acceptance and approval. And that’s what fuels someone’s constant pursuit of health.
Without getting to the root of that, you’ll forever feel addicted to the idea of health and whenever you engage in behaviours that don’t align with it, you’ll feel guilty and fall into the all too common diet-restrict-binge cycle pictured below.
4. Health has become a game of morality
If you feel like you’re a “good” person when you eat a salad, and/or a “bad” person when you eat a donut, you’ve experienced the moral implications of health – and they’re dangerous.
Why? Because creating the expectation, that in order to be healthy, every single morsel of food that goes into your body needs to be healthy, is not only realistic, but impossible.
I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but like, you WILL eat french fries again. You WILL eat a burger. You WILL have ice-cream. But if your belief is that, every single thing you need to eat needs to be healthy, then there’s a 100% guarantee that you’re going to feel guilty after eating any of these foods and you’ll find yourself shortly after in the Diet-Binge Cycle above.
Here’s the truth: eating a salad cannot determine whether you are a good person. This is a construct from diet culture, and it’s only hurting people more than it’s helping people.
Intuitive Eating Coaching will give you tools to detect diet culture and health morality so you can stop it in its tracks and not fall prey to it. Throughout the 4 months of working with my clients, we actively work on dismantling diet culture and health morality, so you don’t always find yourself feeling like a “bad person” if you happen to have a bowl of chips and feel like a failure and go off the rails.
5. Intuitive Eating acknowledges Health At Every Size (weight-inclusive) Principles
While not all, most conventional nutrition approaches do not take a weight inclusive or approach to health. What this means, is that someone in a bigger, fatter body will receive different recommendations than that of a thin person. That is weight stigmatization and problematic. Here’s why: someone in a thinner body can go to the doctor for knee pain and will receive proper recommendations for their knee, whereas, someone in a bigger body would go to the doctor for knee pain and be advised to lose weight (and typically, through all of the crappy diet-based approaches that are out there today that come with a 95% failure rate and further implications and consequences).
Intuitive Eating, on the other hand, does encourage a weight-inclusive approach, which means, despite your body size, shape or weight, you will receive equal treatment to that of the next person. That’s important because weight stigmatization is very isolating and makes health inaccessible to the large portion of the population and many people are currently going without proper care due to the way health and nutrition information is circulated today. And that’s without talking about the food security and poverty issue, but we’ll save that topic for another day.
Who Can Benefit From Working With an Intuitive Eating Coach
As I mentioned above, everyone can benefit from Intuitive Eating, because we were all born intuitive eaters. But the people that will benefit from intuitive eating the most are those that have experienced, or are currently experiencing disordered eating.
Note, disordered eating differs from eating disorders. Eating disorders are classified as mental health conditions such as anorexia, bulimia and orthorexia. Whereas, disordered eating is referring to:
chronic yo-yo dieters
the health obsessed (but feel far from “healthy”)
health & nutrition perfectionists and purists
those that have an all-or-nothing mentality
These are the type of clients I work with in The Intuitive Way For Eating program and have successfully assisted in healing their relationship with food. If that sounds like you, and you are looking for support, well – keep reading!
Benefits of Working With an Intuitive Eating Coach
So, something funny happened last week when sending out the details of The Intuitive Way For Eating program to those on the waitlist. After I sent it out, I received an email back from my client, Chloe, stating that she had a correction to make in what I had mentioned in the email.
In the email, I mentioned “what you get” when you sign up for The Intuitive Way For Eating program. It looked like this:
What You Get (total of 8 one-on-one consultations)
(Please note, program details are subject to change)
x1 Comprehensive Initial Consultation (1 hour)
x6 Themed Follow Up Sessions (45 mins/each)
x6 Pre-Recorded Video Lessons
x6 Workbooks and Reflection Exercises
x1 Wrap Up Call (45 mins)
Access to a private online community
Access to a monthly guest speaker series
She responded saying, “please edit – this is what you actually get”:
Complete FREEDOM from diet culture prison
No longer having to worry about what foods are “good” or “bad”
An improve relationship with food, your body and your mental health
Able to engage with your favourite foods without thinking about them 24/7 or binging on them (and you might even FORGET you have them in the house)
Free from guilt, fear, anxiety and shame around food and body image
The knowledge of what your body truly needs and wants and when it wants and needs it
More time to focus on WAY MORE important things, such as: relationships, family, friendships, hobbies, work, home, spirituality etc
Boosted confidence and a happier, better life
So, it looks like Chloe did my work for me (haha - thanks Chloe!). But that truly does sum up the many benefits of working with an Intuitive Eating Coach. If you’re interested in hearing from more past Intuitive Way For Eating clients about their experience working with an Intuitive Eating Coach like myself, I recommend watching this video!
I should also mention, that Intuitive Eating Coaches are also educated in nutrition and we teach Gentle Nutrition as the last principle of the approach – knowing that we need to address the relationship with food piece first, before exploring nutrition. While I didn’t practice for very long as a Certified Holistic Nutritionist, I do still feel grateful to have that knowledge under my belt so I can communicate it to clients in a non-triggering manner and have a better understanding of the deeper workings of the body overall.
How To Get Started Working With an Intuitive Eating Coach
There is a growing database of Intuitive Eating Coaches, which means there are many to choose from. As little miss intuitive myself, I recommend choosing a coach that intuitively resonates with you and feels like the right fit. I can’t speak to other Intuitive Eating Coaches coaching style as I haven’t worked with them myself, but I can speak to my style and my program …
If you want:
Structure and a plan
Built-in accountability
One-on-one support AND a community / group dynamic
A coach that *gets you* (having navigated both an eating disorder and disordered eating myself)
Someone to hold space for you (AND call you out when your diet brain rears its head - literally, haha)
A coach with the ability to probe you, encourage deeper thinking and make connections for deeper understanding of why you engage with food & your body in the way you do
Then the Intuitive Way For Eating program would be a great fit for you!
For more information about The Intuitive Way For Eating program, head on over to intuitivewayforeating.com (or simply click here). If after reading through the page you feel like it was made for you (which, if you made it this far and you’re still intrigued, that’s a pretty good sign), either hit the “get on the waitlist” or “apply now” button at the bottom of the page. I enrol for the program 3X/year, so depending on the time of year you see this post, we might be in waitlist mode or enrolment mode.
If you have any other questions about Intuitive Eating Coaching, feel free to leave a comment on this post or email me directly at info@rachelmmolenda.com.