Source: http://www.fannetasticfood.com/2016/03/31/announcing-joyful-eating-nourished-life/
When I first became a dietitian in 2013, I knew I wanted to start a private practice, but I wasn’t sure how to approach my work with clients. I wanted to teach people to eat whole, real food that made them feel good. And I wanted to help people to enjoy – not dread exercise. I also knew I didn’t want to use a calorie based approach, because that wasn’t sustainable, and I was not going to teach something I didn’t believe in just because that’s what most everyone else was doing. Plus – in addition to sucking the joy out of food, research was showing that diets don’t work, anyway – and in fact are indicators of long term weight gain. I was also finding that they seemed to set people up for a lot of binging and all or nothing mentality.
So I started helping my clients to make small, gradual changes in their daily lives. We set actionable goals at the end of each session, let those goals become habits, and then any eventual weight loss was the side effect of that behavior change. But I wanted to do more – while those goals and small habit changes made a difference, and I still use them in my client sessions, something was missing – the emotional component. How could I help people move away from the diet approach and embrace a kinder, more natural form of eating that didn’t involve guilt and restriction (and subsequent binging as a result of that restriction)? How could I help people to approach food in a way that was joyful, not fearful – but s…