This month in the Intuitive Eating for Life community, we are talking about navigating fatphobia, anti-fat bias, and diet mentality with family and friends. Just in time for the holidays!

You've taken an inventory of your healthcare experiences and goals, you've prepared yourself physically and emotionally and you've practiced asserting your needs clearly at the doctor's office. And the experience was STILL painful in some way.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: patient-centered healthcare is a human right!! You are entitled to assert your needs at a doctor’s office…

Going to the doctor can be hard. Preparing yourself physically and emotionally will help you navigate these interactions with presence, compassion, and assertiveness. The next time you are preparing to meet with a healthcare clinician, consider the following behaviors to support yourself…

Going to the doctor is often something we negatively anticipate. We might be filled with anxiety leading up to the appointment, struggle to stay present during, and feel drained afterward. Or we might avoid the situation altogether so as not to put ourselves in painful and shameful positions.

The last few weeks, we’ve discussed how to approach meal planning from an Intuitive Eating perspective and added some new ideas to your breakfast, lunch, and dinner rotation. This week, I’m sharing a list of snacks that has been crowdsourced from the Intuitive Eating for Life community.

For me, dinner is the most difficult meal to plan. By the time I need to start pulling things together, I’m simply out of energy. For that reason, having a number of quick and easy recipes to pull together is essential to my family and my sanity.

I’ll admit, I was surprised to learn just how many people skip lunch. Whether this is because they get swept up in the momentum of the day, don’t prioritize the time and preparation necessary to have something available or find something nearby, or intentionally remove this key meal in order to restrict, the end result is usually going an unreasonably long time between meals. This leads to primal hunger and is likely to contribute to overeating later in the day and evening, not to mention poor concentration, irritability, lack of energy, and problems with mood during the day.

We're talking about meal planning this month in the Intuitive Eating for Life community and I'm sharing some of my favorite ideas. I actually enjoy cooking for myself and my family but I also get into ruts. Sometimes I need to revisit what I enjoy and what I haven't had in a while to bring variety and interest back into what I'm making. In that spirit, here are a handful of breakfast ideas to add to your rotation. They are by no means "the right thing to eat for breakfast," only a starting point for your own creativity and preference.

Meal planning can feel counter to Intuitive Eating. Aren't we supposed to wait and see what we feel like eating the moment hunger arises? Well, yes and no. You can and should respond to cravings in real time but real life is complicated; most of us need to have a general sense of what we plan to eat in order to live our lives efficiently and while caring for ourselves and others. The following is one way to think about meal planning in terms of costs, frequency, convenience, ease, and variety.

You might think that the guiding behavioral principles change radically when someone is diagnosed with diabetes. But I highlight the following seven practices for every one of my clients (depending on their readiness), regardless of whether or not they have diabetes.

You might think that the guiding behavioral principles change radically when someone is diagnosed with diabetes. But I highlight the following seven practices for every one of my clients (depending on their readiness), regardless of whether or not they have diabetes.

When we incorporate nutrition into how we’re eating, often the impulse is to focus on what to remove. Many people vow to cut sweets, processed food, and animal proteins, to name a few, only to find themselves craving and/or binging on those foods a short while later.

Sometimes we can’t help but view something new through the lens of something familiar. Many folks who are early in their Intuitive Eating path think about nutrition as they always have – something you either get right or wrong. The good news is, you don’t have to do that any more. When approaching nutrition in Intuitive Eating, it’s all about practice, small steps, and a lot of noticing.

In the 70s it was pasta, in the 80s it was butter, in the 90s eggs and red meat, in the 2000s it was bread, and now we have sugar. Big, bad, scary sugar.

As a dietitian, I can see how we got here. How the scientific and media messages around the healthful or harmful potential of foods flip flopped its way toward the vilification of sugar, but it’s still very dangerous to look at foods this way.