What is mindful eating?

Mindfulness is a form of meditation that helps you recognize and cope with your emotions and physical sensations. It’s used to treat many conditions, including eating disorders, depression, anxiety and various food-related behaviors 

Mindful eating is about using mindfulness to reach a state of full attention to your experiences, cravings, and physical cues when eating.

Fundamentally, mindful eating involves:

• eating slowly and without distraction
• listening to physical hunger cues and eating only until you’re full
• distinguishing between true hunger and non-hunger triggers for eating
• engaging your senses by noticing colors, smells, sounds, textures, and flavors
• learning to cope with guilt and anxiety about food
• eating to maintain overall health and well-being
• noticing the effects food has on your feelings and figure
• appreciating your food

• Mindful eating relies on mindfulness, a form of meditation. Mindful eating is about developing awareness of your experiences, physical cues, and feelings about food.

Our Mission: To support all individuals in healing their relationships with food, body, and mind by creating access to affordable, quality nutrition counseling services. 

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Evidence-Based, Experience-Informed: The science behind nutrition is always evolving. We use the latest scientific research, along with our smany years of professional experience treating nutrition-related diagnoses, to guide us in finding individualized solutions to our clients' issues. 

Access: We believe that all individuals - no matter their socio-economic situation, employment status, or medical diagnosis - deserve access to affordable nutrition services when needed.

Sustainability: Healing your relationship with food, mind, and body is not an easy fix. We strive to support our clients in creating life-long changes in behaviors, thoughts, and beliefs around what it means to be healthy, and how to achieve optimal health. 

Practicality: Your expectations, and ours, should be realistic. We encourage behavior change that is flexible, fluid, and forgiving, rather than strict, harsh, and punishing. 

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Well-Being: Health is not just determined by your BMI, lab values, or body fat percentage. We view health as involving all aspects of you: emotions, moods, thoughts, relationships, judgments, transitions, life goals.

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Acceptance: At the end of the day, we want to support you in feeling happy, healthy, and content in your own skin.  

What Is Intuitive Eating?

Intuitive eating is a non-diet approach to health and wellness that helps you tune into your body signals, break the cycle of chronic dieting and heal your relationship with food.

 It was created by two registered dietitians, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, in 1995, based on their experience working with clients. From a nutrition professional perspective, intuitive eating is a framework that helps us keep nutrition interventions behavior-focused instead of restrictive or rule-focused. 

We are all born natural intuitive eaters. Babies cry to signal their hunger, they eat, and then stop eating when they’re comfortably full. Kids innately balance out their food intake from week to week, eating when they’re hungry and stopping once they feel full. Some days they may eat a ton of food, and other days they may eat barely anything. As we grow older and rules and restrictions are set around food, we lose our inner intuitive eater. We learn to finish everything on our plate. We learn that dessert is a reward, or can be taken away if we misbehave. We are told that certain foods are good for us and others are bad – causing us to feel good about ourselves when we eat certain foods and guilty when we eat others.

Intuitive Eating is not a diet. In fact, it’s exactly the opposite. There’s no counting calories or macros and no making certain foods off limits. It’s not about following a meal plan or measuring out your portions (in fact, that is all discouraged!). Instead, it’s about  putting the focus on your internal cues (aka your intuition) like hunger, fullness and satisfaction, and moving away from external cues like food rules and restrictions.