This orients viewers to the topic and the session's context. The speaker defines making peace with food as taking power away from food and restoring intentional choice, linking it to earlier intuitive eating principles.
The host opens the livestream, mentions her location and schedule change, and announces that the week focuses on principle three of intuitive eating: making peace with food. This orients viewers to the topic and the session's context.
The speaker defines making peace with food as taking power away from food and restoring intentional choice, linking it to earlier intuitive eating principles. This section clarifies why the approach matters for reducing food control and anxiety.
The presenter describes creating a fear-food (or binge-food) hierarchy to identify foods that provoke anxiety or compulsion. She explains this groundwork helps break down food rules and prepares for gradual reintroduction without overwhelming the person.
Practical guidance covers reincorporating foods mindfully—preferably with a full meal, in a safe environment, and not while physiologically starving—to promote presence and accurate internal checks. The speaker emphasizes starting low and slow and using grounding strategies like comfortable company or background music.
A client case shows that intentional, regular exposure to a previously forbidden cookie led to habituation, revealing it wasn't actually preferred and reducing compulsive desire. The example illustrates how this approach can uncover motivations and lead to healthier, more satisfying choices.
Good morning cadre fam. How is everyone doing today? I am coming to you live from Putnam County, Indiana. I'm out of town this weekend for some family stuff, so you get a really fun hotel background. This week is, we're onto principle three of intuitive eating, which is making peace with food. And I think that this is also, didn't do it intentionally, but it's pretty applicable to the upcoming Thanksgiving. Good morning, Jocelyn. I don't know if I've seen you pop in here before. Hello, hello, I'm Kristen.
Nice to have you here. So like I said, today we're going to be talking about. Good morning, Jules. Good to see you again. This week definitely threw me off because I'm now in Eastern time, which is two hours later than I normally do this throughout my day a little bit, but making peace with food. That is principle three of intuitive eating. And the entire premise of making peace with food is to help you, the reason we do it, not the premise, the reason that we wanna make peace with food is because it, again, following the theme of intuitive eating helps to take the power away from the food and put you back in the driver's seat so that you are the one making intentional decisions around your food choices rather than feeling like this food is controlling you.
And so kind of going off of the first two principles, what does this actually look like? Well, making peace with food often starts with taking count of what food rules you have. So we sort of do that in principle one, rejecting the diet mentality, and where those come from. And just being able to kind of have some awareness and recognizing why you might be feeling anxiousness or fear or almost like compulsion around food shows up differently for everybody. But once we have awareness of what the influences are and what our food rules are, we can start to begin to break those down.
And that really is a continuance of rejecting the diet mentality and also Challenging yourself. So one of the main things that I will do with clients to help them make peace with food is create essentially a fear food hierarchy. And it's called a fear food hierarchy. Like I said, it could kind of be the emotion might be a little different for you. It could even be just like a hierarchy of binge foods if that's something that you experience. I saw someone else join and then the name disappeared, but good morning.
It's good to have you here. So making a list of those foods that you feel like for whatever reason you might be out of control around or feel like you're not in the driver's seat when eating. And then the way to make peace with food is to begin to reincorporate those foods, which sounds really scary. And for a lot of people, there's often this fear that if I start to reincorporate these foods, I'm not going to be able to stop. And that's where I like to introduce the concept of habituation. And habituation is the with the diminished physiological or emotional response with continued exposure to a stimulus.
That's like the psychology term, but in this sense it's the repeated exposure to these foods, the novelty wears off and the desire and the draw and the pull towards those foods gets less and less. And oftentimes we start with the lowest foods on those fear food hierarchies or maybe those binge food hierarchies because my goal is to help you work through those without pushing you past the threshold at which you're able to cope with the anxiety or the fear or whatever else is coming up for you. And so reincorporating them very mindfully is the key.
So that could look like potentially, sorry, I feel like I'm about to sneeze, doing it along with a meal you would normally be eating. So if you tend to have, let's say the food is a cookie, right? I don't want you to go not eating all day and then try eating a cookie because then you also have that physiological primal hunger at play, which we talked about last week where if you are physiologically starving, You're not as present. You're not able to be as mindful. You're not really able to check in with yourself and ask yourself, well, how do I feel?
What am I noticing? Is this truly satisfying? Because your body is just trying to get fuel and energy. So challenging these foods, going into it in a very safe space, so in an environment maybe with people you're comfortable around or having TV on or music playing or Just something that helps you to kind of feel safe and grounded in whatever space you're in. And then also having a full meal. We're not replacing a meal with the cookie. I don't know if you can hear that. I'm across the street from a fire department.
My apologies. So being grounded, feeling safe in your space. starting low and slow with those foods that are not quite as scary or overwhelming and really checking in with yourself around, you know, am I truly enjoying this? I've had clients in the past, we did do this with a cookie actually, we introduced cookies that had been kind of off limits in the house growing up and that carried through adulthood and This client of mine actually started to learn that she didn't even really like this particular brand of cookie, but it was something that she was eating almost as an act of rebellion out of all of these years of food rules.
And she no longer has the desire to eat those anymore. That habituation, right, when we intentionally incorporated them on a regular basis, she was able to learn more about herself and the motivations behind why she was choosing those things to the point where now they're not even something that she really thinks about and we found a cookie that she does like and she's not feeling like she only ever eats those foods they're not
