Hey there, I’m Krista! A Registered Dietitian and Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor dedicated to helping women stop dieting for good, eat intuitively and improve their relationships with food and their bodies so they can regain control over their health and live the fulfilling lives they deserve.
Stay tuned to learn more about food freedom and how I help my clients achieve it!
What is Food Freedom?
Food freedom is something that occurs when you embrace intuitive eating. Most of us are born with the ability to eat intuitively, but unfortunately as we age in diet culture, our intuitive eating roots are stripped away from us, and as a result, need to be re-learned.
Individuals who are naturally intuitive eaters, or those who have gone through the process of becoming an intuitive eater, are typically living their lives free from food.
To put it into perspective, this is what it may look like to be free from food:
You don’t follow external food rules
You don’t feel the need to restrict yourself from certain foods (unless medically indicated)
You eat for the purpose of fueling your body properly AND for enjoyment
You don’t experience guilt or shame associated with eating
You prioritize health over your appearance or body size
You have a good relationship with food
Essentially food freedom is what I wish for all of my clients to achieve. Because if you’re not free from food it will take a toll on your quality of life and life satisfaction as food is a huge part of our lives and that is something that will never change.
What’s the difference between food freedom and intuitive eating?
As I mentioned before, food freedom is what you achieve with intuitive eating. Intuitive eating is the process you go through to achieve food freedom. If you want to read more about intuitive eating, you can check out my other article 10 intuitive eating principles + what is intuitive eating?
For now, I’m going to walk you through the specific process that I use to help my clients become intuitive eaters and achieve food freedom through my online course: The Formula for Food Freedom.
As a Registered Dietitian and Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor, I integrate all of the principles of intuitive eating into my practice, as well as the many nuances, to ensure my clients have the best outcomes possible.
So, without further ado, here’s how I help individuals achieve food freedom.
How to find freedom from food
1. Validate your decision to stop dieting
In order to work towards food freedom, the first step is to make the decision for yourself to stop dieting FOR GOOD. Which may lead you to ask yourself, “why would I stop dieting?” Well that’s a great question.
I’ve actually gone into great detail on this topic in a previous article I wrote on the disadvantages of dieting. If you aren’t currently aware of these disadvantages, I highly recommend you go give that article a read, because if that doesn't solidify your decision to stop dieting, I’m not sure what will.
But, to sum it up…diets don’t work, they cause a lot of harm (physically, mentally and emotionally), therefore worsening your overall health AND they interfere with your ability to live an enjoyable and fulfilling life.
Now keep in mind, stopping dieting is the first step that needs to take place in this journey BUT it takes a heck of a lot more than to JUST stop dieting. This is a point I really want to drive home because I’m well aware that when an individual just stops dieting it’s complete chaos.
However, when an individual stops dieting and starts their intuitive eating journey it’s a smoother transition into a healthy lifestyle that can be maintained lifelong. Yes, that’s right, lifelong. You will never have to diet again.
2. Do the work to overcome diet culture
Something that I always tell my clients is that you have to be actively working against diet culture. Because unfortunately, we’re not going to see the end of diet culture in our lifetime but we can absolutely mitigate the negative impacts it has on us as individuals.
Just by working on this journey to food freedom you’re overcoming diet culture but it has a way of trying to sneak itself back into your mind and life. So what I want is for you to make every effort to diminish it.
This could be something as simple as curating your social media feed to follow weight inclusive, non-diet accounts (start by following me @dietitian.krista) and unfollowing accounts that make you feel anything less about your body or food choices.
Or it could be as bold as refining your friend group. Yup, I said it. You know that friend that is always preaching about her latest diet, recommending you get on the bandwagon with her, calling out other peoples whose bodies don’t meet her standards?? You may want to distance yourself from this friend or AT LEAST set some hard boundaries.
Other things you can do to actively work against diet culture is to read relevant books (feel free to reach out for my favourite recommendations) or listen to some non-diet podcasts: here are some non-diet podcasts I’ve interviewed on (I highly recommend you give them a listen).
And if you’re ready to go all in on this journey enroll in my online course: The Formula for Food Freedom where you will get the step by step strategy to stop dieting for good, overcome diet culture, eat intuitively and live a life of food freedom.
Sounds pretty great doesn't it? That’s because it is ;)
3. Get back in touch with your body cues (i.e. hunger and fullness)
Once you tackle the pre-work, you’ll be ready to get into the whole eating part of this journey.
Whether you’ve been a dieter, a pseudo-dieter or just a person living in diet culture (that’s all of us) trying to navigate all of the different food rules and nutrition information (or should I say misinformation) you’ve probably become somewhat disconnected from your body cues.
It’s extremely important that you get back in touch with these cues. Why? Because this disconnect prevents you from getting the appropriate fuel for your body. Whether that’s not enough of a certain nutrient or too much of something (i.e. overeating).
If you want to improve your health, you need to be able to tune into these cues or you’ll never be able to make appropriate fueling decisions for your body.
Here are some signs that you’re disconnected from your body cues:
You’ve been on multiple diets
You often rely on external food rules to guide your food choices (i.e. calorie or carb content, time of day, point systems, etc.)
You skip meals or go prolonged periods of time during waking hours without eating
You only notice extremes of hunger and fullness (typically the growling stomach and overly full stomach) and not the subtle cues
You often find yourself either undereating or overeating
You don’t know what foods satisfy your current needs
I’ve never had a client that was fully in touch with their body cues and they have diet culture to thank for that. How to get back in touch with these cues involves going into more detail than I can cover here, but a good first step is to ensure you’re eating regular meals and snacks.
4. End the food fight
When we end the food fight we say goodbye to food rules (trust me, you have them even if you don’t realize it), we remove the guilt and shame from your eating experiences, we stop restricting unnecessarily and we habituate foods (bye bye uncontrollable cravings).
This is when we really get into the nitty gritty of all of those food rules you have been following like not eating after 7PM, cutting out carbs or only allowing yourself to eat bread once a day.
In this phase, you’ll learn how to debunk common nutrition myths so you can stop unnecessarily restricting.
This is also the time when we start removing food guilt and make foods neutral. Food does NOT hold moral value, so we need to stop feeling so ashamed and guilty about what we eat. Because ultimately shame and guilt aren’t good motivators to live a healthy life.
And lastly, we habituate foods. You know that one food that you just can’t seem to trust yourself around? The food you can’t keep in your house because you know you will finish it all in one night? Well we’re going to put an end to that.
It’s time you learn how to be around all foods without restricting or feeling deprived AND without overindulging or eating just to eat it.
Ending the food fight is probably my favourite piece of the whole food freedom journey. Which may be partially due to the fact that most people believe this is where all of their struggles are happening and it truly is when all of the pieces start coming together.
But again, don’t discount the first three pieces I mentioned because without them you won’t be able to work on this part. Which is why a strategy is so important in this journey.
5. Do the body image work
There is not necessarily a right or wrong time to start doing body image work on your journey, but it is extremely important to do.
The reason being that our negative body image and beliefs about what a body should look like are more often than not the reason we ever started dieting in the first place, in turn creating a poor relationship with food and this disconnect from our bodies.
Doing body image work or improving your body image does NOT mean that you are going to love your body, nor does it mean that you will never desire to change your body again.
The goal of body image work is to at least become more neutral about your feelings towards your body, potentially working to a place of acceptance and not letting the way you feel about your appearance hold you back from doing the things that you truly want to do.
It may feel impossible to improve your body image without actually changing your body, but it’s important to realize your physical appearance and your body image are two separate things.
6. Uncomplicate your nutrition
A client recently said to me “I love how you simplify nutrition, it doesn't have to be as complicated or difficult as what we’re made to believe.” And this couldn’t be more true.
Sure, nutrition is overall a complicated science with A LOT of unknowns. But in terms of the general recommendations that the general public should follow, it truly isn’t that complicated.
What makes it complicated is all of the misinformation across the media. So uncomplicate it and make your nutrition as simple and realistic as possible.
Consume regular meals and snacks, have a balance of macronutrients, include fruits and vegetables multiple times a day, incorporate high quality fats and protein (including some plant proteins), pick whole grains that you enjoy, incorporate fish and don’t forget to enjoy your treats.
I have a gentle nutrition section inside of The Formula for Food Freedom that goes into more detail but gives it to you straight. No fluff or exaggerations. Just simple, basic nutrition from a non-BS dietitian.
7. Take care of yourself
Last but not least, take care of yourself. If you’re not taking care of yourself throughout this journey it is going to be really difficult to achieve food freedom.
Why? Because when you aren’t meeting your basic physical, emotional and mental needs, it can feel impossible to tune into your body's needs, which is obviously a very important part of this journey.
So, if you’re chronically stressed, find some strategies and coping mechanisms to deal with that stress, if you’re not active enough find a way to start moving intuitively, if you need more “me-time” carve that time out in your schedule right now. Self care is SO important.
And on that note, take a look at what a client had to say on the topic of self-care about my online course: The Formula for Food Freedom:
Common food freedom mistakes
1. Only working on one or two pieces of the whole journey
The biggest mistake I see people making is only taking a piece or two away from the whole process (or skipping important pre-steps).
For example, some people think food freedom is just eating whatever you want whenever you want. While yes, food freedom involves removing restriction from your life as much as possible, that doesn’t necessarily mean just eat whatever you want whenever you want.
It’s still important to consider your health, what your body actually needs and how you want to feel overall.
It’s also really important that you work on reconnecting with your body cues before you work on the “eat what you want, whenever you want piece.”
But again, you can’t just do that piece on its own either (i.e. only relying on body cues). For many reasons, but most importantly, at the beginning of this journey there is a very good chance you can’t rely on your body cues. So you need to do the work to get those cues back which often actually means not fully listening to those cues (I know this sounds counterintuitive, but often necessary).
2. Not having a strategy
The other common food freedom mistake I see being made is trying to do it without a strategy. This process is complicated and very nuanced.
If you go in without a strategy you’re likely not going to be implementing all of the pieces of this journey. As a result, you’re going to feel confused and unsure if you’re doing it right. It will feel very chaotic and you’ll end up having less faith in this process.
Going in with a strategy and guidance from a professional who works in this space will make a world of a difference. So, I think you know what’s next…
The Formula for Food Freedom: Online Course
The Formula for Food Freedom: Online Course is a step by step process and strategy to stop dieting food good, eat intuitively and live a life of food freedom.
Here’s what you can achieve with The Formula for Food Freedom:
Get out of the cycle of dieting, food restriction and food rules
Get back in touch with your body cues, so you can rely on them (paired with the nutrition knowledge you will gain) to guide food decisions
Remove food guilt, uncontrollable cravings and overeating episodes
Understand what it means to fuel your body adequately
Live a life in which your diet, exercise routine and body image don’t interfere with daily living
Improve your relationship with food, your body and movement
And of course overall health improvement
If you take this course seriously and work through it consistently, you can achieve SO MUCH. It truly can change the trajectory of your life for the better.
For more details about the course, take a look for yourself here- The Formula for Food Freedom: Online Course
Have questions about The Formula for Food Freedom: Online course? It may already be answered in the frequently asked questions here. Otherwise, don’t hesitate to reach out, you can contact me here.
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