Frequently Asked Questions

What is Intuitive Eating?

Intuitive Eating is a self-care eating framework that offers 10 principles as guideposts in the journey towards healing your relationship with food, mind and body. The principles of intuitive eating work in two ways:

1. To strengthen self-connection, or body attunement.
2. To remove the disrupters of self-connection, or body attunement.

While intuitive eating is a revolutionary approach in a society bombarded with diet culture and weight-centric messaging, eating based on instinct and intuition is how we were all born to eat. So, in a sense, intuitive eating is about reclaiming, re-aligning and rediscovering skills you once knew.

Intuitive Eating is about:

• Aligning your eating with the needs of your unique body, mind, emotions, culture and values.

• Rejecting diet culture and the reliance on rules to govern what, when and how much you eat.

• Cultivating self-connection with your body, mind and soul.

• Nourishment as a basic biological need and form of self-care.

• Making food choices based on body cues, rational thought, pleasure and emotions.

• Healing your relationship to food, mind and body.

• Bringing pleasure back into the experience of eating.

• Dignity and respect for all bodies.

• Building trust.

• Learning and discovery.

• Curiosity over judgment.

What’s the difference between a weight-inclusive approach and a weight-centric approach?

Currently, doctors and many health care professionals (including dietetics) are taught through a weight-centric perspective, where weight and body size is believed to be central to good health. In a weight-centric health care system, losing weight is not only the most typical treatment recommendation when health issues arise, but it is still encouraged and focused on even when the patient is in good health. A weight-centric approach is entrenched with bias, fatphobia and is a quite narrow view that doesn’t take into consideration other (and more profound) determinants of health, such as: genetics, environment, behaviors, relationship to food and exercise, trauma history and adverse childhood experiences, mental and emotional health, stress, stigma, discrimination, ablesim, oppression and poverty.

When we shift our focus away from weight it allows us to take the blinders off and broaden our understanding of health. Therefore, a weight-inclusive approach rejects BMI and the pathologizing of weight and instead centers care around all of the above factors. A weight-inclusive approach appreciates that body diversity is a fact (that not all bodies are meant to be small), offers dignity and respect for all body sizes and puts weight regulation back into the hands of genetics and your biology.

What is the difference between a dietitian and a nutritionist?

In short, a dietitian is a nutritionist, but a nutritionist is not necessarily a dietitian. To become a dietitian, you are required to obtain a Bachelor’s degree in nutrition and complete a 10-12 month accredited dietetic internship program though a University or a Hospital, followed by the completion and passing of a standardized exam. Dietitians are licensed and credentialed, and the field of dietetics is protected under law. There is no regulation or laws around who can call themselves a nutritionist. Meaning, a ‘nutritionist’ can range from being a self-labeled health enthusiast on Instagram, to someone with a PhD in Nutrition who didn’t take the dietitian route. Also, only Dietitians are legally allowed provide medical nutrition therapy in the treatment and prevention of disease.

Will I get a meal plan?

I’m SO glad you asked! This is a common question and assumption for most people when they begin to work with a dietitian. The benefit of a meal plan is highly individualized and is sometimes helpful and sometimes unhelpful, so this is something you and I will talk about together. What I will say, is that a meal plan is a way we can lay down the foundation of regular, reliable and consistent eating if and when necessary. However, a structured meal plan not intended to be maintained forever, but is rather a stepping stone or bridge towards self-regulated and intuitive eating. Meal and snack planning is certainly something we will bring into our sessions, but collaboration is key here, so we will brainstorm and get creative on this together!

Where will meet? (in person or virtual)

Currently all appointments are being provided virtually via telehealth only. In-person visits may be offered in 2022.

How long do you typically work with clients?

This is also highly individualized based on where you’re at when we begin our work together and the type of support you’re looking for. I always say to my clients, by the end of our work together I want you trusting yourself more than you trust me, so the duration of our relationship will be however long it takes for you to get to a place where you have the skills, wisdom and trust to eat intuitively and healthfully for you and your body.