Intuitive Eating, Chronic Dieting, and Body Image
Are you ready to finally get off the diet roller coaster and make peace with food?
You have come to the right place, where you can learn to stop fearing food and weight gain, and instead create a relationship with food and your body which is based on respect, trust and acceptance.
At Freedom from Food we take great care to practice in a non-judgemental and inclusive way, treating all of our clients with the respect and dignity that they deserve, irrespective of health status, weight or size.
We ensure that all of our practitioners and referral partners practice a non-diet approach, which is aligned with the Health At Every Size movement. What this means is that we make a conscious decision to reject dieting, whilst along the way, challenging stereotypes and common assumptions about health and weight.
We believe that everyone has a right to love, honour and respect the body that they live in, whilst living free from judgement and discrimination.
At Freedom from Food, you can be guaranteed that your weight, shape and size will (finally!) never be a focus of treatment. Rather, treatment will focus on the creation of healthy habits and skills which support mental, emotional and physical health. Our intuitive eating programs are appropriate for anyone experiencing:
- Disordered eating patterns
- Episodes of binge eating
- Episodes of restriction
- Body dissatisfaction / poor body image
- Weight or size concerns
- Confusion about food choices
- Obsessive thinking about food
- Rigid thinking about food
- Guilt or shame around food choices
- Cravings
- Compulsive exercise
Following principles of attuned eating, it is possible for you to stop feeling the shame and guilt that you feel after every failed diet, and instead learn how to listen to your body and let your body naturally guide you in determining what you need. This is a natural gift that we were all born with, however trained ourselves out of, with diet after diet, as we tried to fit in the ‘cultural ideal’. You deserve more than that.
Upon making contact, you will be invited to attend a free initial 15-minute consultation (either in person, phone or skype/zoom). In this consultation, your therapist will get to know a little more about you and your history, in order to ascertain your needs and what will likely be the best plan for treatment going forward.
You will be offered a treatment plan which will consist of individual sessions of counselling and hypnotherapy. Depending on your needs, you may also be offered one of our online programs as well as the chance to participate in our group therapy sessions with access to our online community for support. Please note that whilst a treatment plan will initially be designed for you, this will be subject to change, depending on your progression through recovery.
If acute malnutrition or low body weight is present, you may be asked throughout the treatment process to visit a doctor and permit contact between the doctor and therapist. This is so that your therapist is able to adhere to an adequate level of duty of care, and maintain an ongoing treatment process that is outside of an in-patient treatment setting.
What is the non-diet approach?
Whilst it is recognised that most common diets (‘wellness diets’, ‘lifestyle changes’, however you want to label it) will reliably induce weight loss in the short term, research tells us that the vast majority of individuals who lose weight will not be able to sustain that weight loss in the long term.
You might have experienced this yourself. Many people who follow a diet will lose weight whilst they are on that diet. However, as soon as the diet stops, the weight often returns; that and some extra.
This is what is called the diet cycle, and it happens because at the heart of most diets is the premise of restriction and deprivation.
On a diet you must count calories and avoid your favourite foods. If you are a perpetual dieter, you will already know that this sets off the ‘alarm’ in the brain; restriction and deprivation are coming!
You must ignore the natural signals that your body is giving you; signals that are biologically hardwired in to your body from birth. Before long, you see that you are missing out. You have to eat differently, avoid joining in socially and you must constantly deny yourself foods which are a natural part of a healthy and balanced diet.
Your mind, body and environment will naturally fight against this. On a typical weight loss diet, you are instructed to think constantly about food, so guess what happens when you ‘fall off the wagon’; you’re thinking about food more than ever. This in turn sets up a vicious cycle of shame and feeling like a failure. It is not you who failed however, IT WAS THE DIET THAT FAILED. Conscious self-denial of something will often lead to an increased desire of that very thing. There is a term for this; Salience. Food starts to have a higher salience than it did before.
Research has shown that repeated episodes of weight fluctuations are more harmful to your health than being overweight to begin with. More importantly, dieting can lead to reduced self-esteem, reduced mental health, confusion and obsession about food and even an eating disorder.
The truth is that if you are a person who is vulnerable to disordered eating, diets are actually one of the most dangerous and counterproductive things that you can do.
So, is it time for you to reject diet culture and the thin ideal and instead learn to love the body that you are in?