Twin sisters and body-image experts, Dr. Lindsay Kite and Dr. Lexie Kite share how to move from wanting to believe that your body looks good to knowing that your body IS good – a big difference!

I also really liked the way that the authors talked about exercise and fitness: People need to learn to see exercise as a separate thing from food. They asked a question, something like, how often do people think 'Oh, I ate so poorly today. I ate so much.. even working out won't solve that..' or 'only 10 minutes of a workout is not worth it.' or 'going for a walk does not burn enough calories etc.'. people need to see that while excising can be used as a tool in a diet, it is also separate from it. Because all those things mentioned above do not matter at all, if you consider for only one moment, what exercising means for your BODY and health, and not necessarily for body aims/diet aims. 10 minutes of slowly walking is STILL good for you, for your heart, even if it might not burn so many calories. And so on.I really do NOT want to be hassled with the dieting frustration, but the anxiety of not taking care of myself, the encouragement from my doctor to drop even five pounds, the unintentional (or otherwise) pressure of friends and family who are all dieting, add up to unbelievable amounts of guilt. In an overture to alleviating some of this guilt, I recently attended a nutrition seminar during one of my lunch breaks. I must confess that I really had no intention of starting yet another exercise in proving just how little self-control I have, but I went.

Intuitive eating is an alternative approach that was developed in response to the negative mental and physical health effects caused by traditional diets for weight loss, which involve the deliberate long-term restriction of food. IE allows internal cues to guide one’s eating choices and patterns rather than a meal plan or designated rules. The Intuitive Eating Workbook: Ten Principles for Nourishing a Healthy Relationship with Food by Evelyn Tribole, MS, RDN, CEDRD-S and Elyse Resch, MS, RDN, CEDRD, FAND The Intuitive Eating Guide to Recovery: Let Go of Toxic Diet Culture, Reconnect with Food, and Build Self-Love by Meme Inge, MS, RD This one should be a no-brainer and first on the list. So many books are available about Intuitive Eating, but many of them are just watered-down versions of this original. Rather than swimming through misinformation or less accurate writing, start here with this book. Intuitive Eating gets rid of the diet mentality and is a book for people who have tried to lose weight before by obsessively monitoring what they eat. It is a great reminder of a way better option and possibly the only one that will make you happy in the long run: listening to your own body.

Struggling with meal planning?

Evelyn was the nutrition expert for Good Morning America, appearing from 1994-’95 and was a national spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association for 6 years. She was contributing editor for Shape magazine where her monthly column, Recipe Makeovers, appeared for 11 years.

Or basically read Appendix B, because that has everything in the book, minus the 16 trillion anecdotes and stories from supposed patients that sound suspiciously fake. (All the clients adopt this diet and suddenly, angels float down from heaven to carry them up with a basket of kittens farting rainbows.) Good grief, I get it - you want to sell this book and plan, so let's make up a bunch of stories of people who were fat or had bad body image, went to you, and suddenly life was a miracle. Make your eating experience more enjoyable by giving yourself a distinct time (15 min), sitting down at the table, taking several breaths before eating, eating slowly, sensually, savour each bite, put the fork down, and feel your fullness. So, sometimes in this modern day of industrialized food we have to put mind over matter and decide with our mind - not our cravings or feelings - how we should fuel our bodies. I don’t feel that it is helpful advice - in today’s world where junk food is everywhere - to eat whatever you feel that you want, ignoring common sense, while proposing that it will make you healthier.

The Japanese have the wisdom to keep pleasure as one of their goals of healthy living. In our compulsion to comply with diet culture, we often overlook one of the most basic gifts of existence—the pleasure and satisfaction that can be found in the eating experience. When you eat what you really want, in an environment that is inviting, the pleasure you derive will be a powerful force in helping you feel satisfied and content. By providing this experience for yourself, you will find that it takes just the right amount of food for you to decide you’ve had “enough.” 6. Feel Your Fullness Once you’ve read through this book, there are a few more that I recommend for your Intuitive Eating library. Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works Don’t fear negative feelings. Accept that negative emotions like stress, anger, and boredom will come and go. Learn to cope with these feelings without using food: talk to a friend, go for a walk, take a shower, pray, or meditate.

May not improve health outcomes related to weight gain or chronic disease. IE concepts encourage self-care and a positive response to food, which may or may not cause a change towards healthful eating patterns (consuming more fruits and vegetables, less sweetened beverages and foods, less fried foods, not skipping meals, etc.). An individual has the freedom to choose fast food and soda if desired, so IE will not necessarily lead to a disease-preventive eating pattern or to a reversal of weight gain. After discovering that their clients were not responding well to the traditional methods of nutrition counseling, such as prescribing meal plans and set caloric intakes, they began to test out what is now known as intuitive eating. Desire for food occurs suddenly (e.g., because of an emotion such as anger or stress, or from external cues such as viewing a television commercial or other food advertising) Similar to the workbook by Tribole and Resch, this book by dietitian Cara Harbstreet offers up even more exercises to help you discover the joy of intuitive eating. Harbstreet focuses on three goals: saying no to diet culture, how to tune inward, and how to keep nutrition in mind, too. If you like to journal or have been wanting to dabble, these written thought exercises are perfect prompts to explore and improve your relationship with food.You may need to go through a grieving period for the loss of food as comforter and companion. You may also find you’re experiencing your feelings in a deeper way since you’re no longer covering them up. Leigh SJ, Morris MJ. The role of reward circuitry and food addiction in the obesity epidemic: An update. Biological psychology. 2018 Jan 1;131:31-42. Your body needs to know consistently that it will have access to food – that dieting and deprivation have halted, once and for all.