Have you been told that following diets and maintaining a certain weight is necessary to be healthy? Do you find that rejecting diets feels difficult because of the culture we live in? Are you thinking about cutting out certain foods to help manage a health issue? Listen now for some help with these varied obstacles to food peace. Subscribe and leave a review here in just seconds. Key Points: Intuitive eating: a way to relate to food without dieting, relying on your own hunger and fullness cues to decide when to eat and how much to eat, unconditional permission to eat what you need and want, and finding ways to deal with our emotions without food. Medical Nutrition Therapy (MNT): when someone use food to help manage their disease and prevent disease progression. Joanne and Jonah Soolman of Soolman Nutrition and Wellness join to discuss disease management using nutrition and intuitive eating! Coming out of dieting and entering intuitive eating can be really difficult! It's a huge mindset shift, and some people may feel ambivalent about the transition. Intuitive eating is complete 180 degree shift from diet culture, which is something we have been taught from a super young age. Diet culture includes "truths" such as fat is unhealthy etc. It makes sense that we might have strong feelings in opposing directions (ambivalence)... the research doesn't support diets, but dies are what we've been taught to believe in. So what now? By recognizing ambivalence, we can help individuals empower themselves to make their own decision! People who are considered "overweight" or "obese" have healthier outcomes when they engage in healthy behaviors, regardless of weight. Dieting is an all or nothing approach! Sometimes this leads people to feel like they're going to go out of control with food when they give up dieting for good and shift to intuitive eating. When we leave dieting behind, it may actually feel like a void has been created. This attachment and anxiety is normal! Intuitive eating takes time!!! Generally speaking, if someone is completely recovered from an eating disorder, it takes about a year to move through all of the intuitive eating principles. Fear of weight gain can be a huge deterrent for people to commit to intuitive eating. Intuitive eating is a process, so be patient and let it work itself out! How do we deal with feeling like our weight is causing us physical pain? We have to consider that weight may not be the issue. Bodies get older, and this makes them hurt. It may not be the weight at all, and it might be more beneficial to try and strengthen certain muscles or change up exercise routines to alleviate stress on the body. We also have to not make weight the focal point. 95% of diets fail, and most people regain more weight than was lost... so if you try to lose weight to help alleviate chronic pain, you may actually make it worse in the long run! Thin people have joint and knee pain at a certain age... it isn't necessarily the weight! There are other ways to relieve pain! Doctors, physical therapists, Advil... Can you name one disease that fat people have that thin people don't? NO! How do we explore managing a disease with our food? First we have to meet our essential food needs (Ellyn Satter's Hierarchy of Food Needs)... intuitive eating is part of these essential, baseline needs! Medical Nutrition Therapy: managing a medical condition through food. It is a part of our food needs as well, but it is at the very top of pyramid, and one of the last things to worry about. If you have chronic, rather than acute health conditions, allow yourself to build a solid foundation in intuitive eating. Once you are secure in that, then you can add MNT in! Otherwise MNT could spiral into just another diet. Be careful when trying to cut out foods in the name of health! There's a lot of dietary guidelines out there that are extremely restrictive, and extreme restriction leads to bingeing. Disease is gradual. One cookie or one