1. Repeat after me: there is nothing wrong with having emotions about food. Our cultures, celebrations, associations, and special experiences are what make our relationship with food uniquely ours. Clarify for yourself what you would like the quality of your emotional relationship with food to be. For example, it might be one in which the emotional connection with food provides comfort and guides you to take care of yourself, without feeling like you over rely on food to cope with strong emotions.

Everything - feelings, thoughts, enjoyable meals, painful emotions - is impermanent. Each phenomenon arises, levels off, and eventually dissolves.

In this special video, which was one of our Intuitive Eating for Life Community gatherings (edited to remove individual members and just preserve the content presented), I discuss that predictable life cycle of pleasant and unpleasant phenomena and provide some ideas for how to observe this, practice staying with it, and ultimately cultivating the ability to be there with and for yourself through all of life's ups and downs.

In this week's video, I offer some thoughts about why an emotional relationship with food and eating can be a wonderful thing and how subtle investigation and internal work can help you create an emotional relationship with food that feels nurturing rather than distressing. LMK your thoughts!

A confusing thing about any type of "loss of control eating" - whether emotional eating, binging, consistently eating past fullness, stress eating, eating mindlessly or out of boredom - is how connected it is to some form of restriction. This restriction could be restriction of the quantity or type of food or it could be unmet emotional needs. What is important to understand here is that "over" eating is almost always a reaction to some form of "under" eating or not getting "enough" elsewhere in your life.

Most people I speak with - both professionally AND personally - are afraid of what I think when they tell me what they eat. They assume - often because this has been true of RDs they've spoken with in the past - that I'm judging their choices and imagining "healthy swaps" to replace what they are eating with what they "should" be eating. In fact, I'm thinking about very different things and I realized it might be useful to you to know what they are:

A warm hug and a gentle shout out to anyone sensitive to what's going on in the world and feeling that bubble up in their personal lives, including in their relationship with food and body. I wanted to share a few of the tools I use in my own life to work with the inevitable disheartenment that sometimes arises.

No video this week, my loves. My eyeballs have been leaking too much in the last week to try to get through this topic on camera. What I can do, however, is write it out, or at least try.

My heart is broken for this country. For people dying trying to celebrate a joyous holiday, driving to their mom's house, and just going about their lives. We are so clearly not ok.

Happy New Year, in case I haven't said that already! I'm so excited to announce that the Intuitive Eating for Life Community is launching next Tuesday morning with live events starting that very day. This community will initially be limited to 100 participants and only offered to newsletter subscribers, ie, you! 

Lately I've been contemplating the HOW of Intuitive Eating, as in how does this actually come together? HOW does one DO Intuitive Eating? We know it's not a linear process and that there is significant overlap between the "stages of Intuitive Eating." We know that there are some universal truths we all experience in approaching Intuitive Eating and there are a lot of unique experiences based on our personal histories.

Happy holidays to everyone. This week's video is a bit grainy because I recorded it behind my in-laws' house in Sicily as the sun was going down. In it, I ponder what might change if we could look at our Intuitive Eating practice as just that: a practice. With other practices like meditation and yoga to compare to, Intuitive Eating can be something that we do over and over again, though different physical and emotional states, as a means of "staying with" ourselves.

No video this week, unfortunately. I'm fighting off a cold or flu or false-negative COVID, but wanted to be in touch nevertheless to share some thoughts. 

One of my favorite teachings in Buddhist philosophy is that all experiences can be approached as opportunities to wake up to the nature of reality. Or, alternatively, they can be a route to go further to sleep. I try to remember this teaching whenever I deal with difficulty, big or small.

I’m so excited to invite you to join me for this conversation with Intuitive Eating co-creators and co-authors Elyse Resch and Evelyn Tribole. We discussed the emerging aspects of mindfulness over the course of more than 25 years and four editions!

This week we start talking about the topic of movement. It's a big topic and not unlike fullness, fraught for many. Please send me any thoughts, questions, and challenges you're facing with movement so I can weave them into upcoming videos. And thank you, as always, for being part of this community!

My new book Intuitive Eating for Life: How Mindfulness Can Deepen and Sustain Your Intuitive Eating Practice is officially here!

I'm not a fan of self promotion but I take some solace in the fact that promoting this book - and anything that is anti-diet - helps us all. I so hope that this book is a positive force in your life and that you will stay connected so that we can find more and more community together. More goodness coming in 2023!

This week we're talking about working with things as they are. Sounds easy, right? WRONG!!!! It may be a simple concept but there are so many reasons we fight with reality. I hope you'll take a deep breath, rouse self-compassion, and consider some of these words as we head into the holiday weekend.