5 Step Framework for Food Freedom, Intuitive Eating, and Feeling Awesome in Your Skin!
Are you ready to learn the five step framework for empowered eating?
We're breaking down how we can move from obsessive eating to food freedom, intuitive eating, and best of all (like most important) feeling confident and awesome in our own skin! If you want to experience food freedom, it’s vital you feel empowered, strong, and capable in your own skin.
I’m teaching you the exact five step framework I used to move from fear-based obsessive eating, to intuitive empowered eating. This framework has allowed me to become my strongest, fittest, spiritually connected and most mentally balanced self!
After all, let's face it, how we feel in our skin and our body, directly affects how we carry and take care of our body.
How we care for our body has a huge impact on the energy we bring into the world. And I know every single human has a divine and unique purpose in their life. There is something uniquely incredible about you and what you can give to this world.
It kind of reminds me of when I was in kindergarten. I remember my teacher taking us on field trips, and everywhere we went, the teacher would have us take a good look around and really take in our surroundings before we walked into wherever we were going. And then, when we left, she would make us pause and look back and consider - did we leave this place better than we found it?
That teacher was modeling strong character, and her lesson was to leave everywhere we go a little bit better than we found it. And I believe that you have the ability to leave the world a little bit better than you found it too, simply by sharing your unique gifts and divine purpose.
However, I see way too often, how we as women let the lies of our diet culture physique-obsessed world get the best of us, and tell us that we're not good enough. We're not capable enough.
And we tie these lies up in our body image and don't take care of ourselves. And therefore, we inhibit or eclipse our ability to leave the world better than we found it.
This is why I'm so passionate about empowered eating, and why I want to share this five step framework with you today. I believe that once we break the steps down, and we can get ourselves into an empowered place with food and our body, we can do the very thing my kindergarten teacher taught me to do - which is leave the world a better place than we found it.
When I look back at my eating journey, I think wow - it has been so complex, and convoluted. I did a lot wrong, honestly, in the beginning. I did obsessed about macros. I categorized foods into good or bad lists.
I weighed myself daily and misinterpreted the change on the scale as an indicator of my own success or failure, depending on which direction the scale went.
I bet you can relate.
The thing is, I knew this obsessive approach wasn't working. It wasn't working because I wasn't happy in my own skin. Despite all the effort, I never felt like I was making any progress.
I didn't even know what progress was. I just knew I never seemed to reach my goals.
It wasn't until I went back to school to become a dietitian that I actually started learning about food and how it interacts with our body.
I became absolutely enthralled with the science behind nutrition. I was fascinated with how our body worked in congruence with all of these nutrients from food to sustain, heal, and grow life. In class, I was honestly like a kid in a candy shop.
I was super jazzed and excited when I became a dietitian, and I also knew that I wanted to work specifically with patients with eating disorders.
As I started my career working with eating disorders, I realized that all of that information I had learned in class actually didn't jive with this specific population. It was really interesting how much of my initial dietetic training actually conflicted with my eating disorder training. It kind of felt like I was trying to fit a round peg in a square hole when it came to sharing information with people who struggled with food.
I specialized in the eating disorder world for about ten years, until my career took another shift when I started working with a UFC fighter.
For those of you who don't know UFC is mixed martial arts, and they actually fight based on their weight. I was recruited because I am also a sports specialist, and I was the only one in New Mexico at the time. I was recruited to help this individual reach their weight for the weigh in, and it honestly conflicted with a lot of my eating disorder training.
So here I was again, where my new training and my new career path conflicted with the previous one - and I felt really confused. I realized at that moment that health is highly individualized, and the core is helping people discern which health patterns, nutrition choices, and diet lifestyles are best for them. I couldn't impose my own values.
It has to come down to each individual person's values.
My job was to help them do their own value inventory and connect how their health behaviors can support their values, or how they might rework their health behaviors to better support their values.
As their coach, it was my job was to challenge them from moving from a place of comfort, which was conflicting with their values, and move them through fear into that learning and growth phase.
Now, when I came to the realization that I did not have to choose between being an eating disorder dietitian or a sports dietitian, that was a huge relief.
This is when the empowered eating model was born. I was free to explore again. I was free to be in people's corners and help them figure it out for themselves.
So how do you move from obsessive eating to food freedom, intuitive eating, and feeling awesome in your own skin?
Step #1: create value driven goals
The first step is value inventory and creating value driven goals. This is the very first thing I do with all of my clients and is the first thing we unpack in the Empowered Eating Method. We have to figure out what is most important to us, and how that connects to our goals.
Some of our values have been imposed on us. So like beauty and aesthetics, or control and discipline, some of these values were things that we were told we had to value, and we need to take inventory and make sure we're choosing the ones that are in alignment with our true authentic self.
Step #2: break down the body bully
Once we have the first step mapped out, we can actually sleep clearly and break down what I call the body bully. We all have this little voice inside our head that just beats our body up. It just talks crap to our body all day long. I mean, think of some of the things you say in your head to your body, would you ever say that to anyone else?
Chances are no.
You probably wouldn't even say it out loud, and yet you're still saying it inside your head and accepting it as truth.
So once we have values kind of as our compass, we can move into the body bully takedown and actually stand a chance to look at some of these thoughts that we have and rewire them.
Step #3: Learn to Listen to Your Biofeedback
The third step is what I call biofeedback. This is a fancy word for listening to how your body talks to you about the way you take care of it.
I encourage my clients to put the scale down and really shift attention towards other forms of biofeedback like: your hunger cues, your satiety cues, your bell movements, your sleep, your energy, your muscle growth. All of these factors deserve more attention, then the scale and how much you weigh.
We spend a lot of time focusing on biofeedback in the Empowered Eating Method. Understanding how our body works and discussing topics such as:
Why do we need carbohydrates?
Why do diets fail when I try to restrict my food?
Why am I more hungry when I don't sleep well?
Why do I feel more hungry and less satisfied with food?
Your body is not something to be fixed. It is something to be understood - and biofeedback allows us to do that.
Step #4: Fuel Planning
So once we have the first three steps down we can enter into fuel planning. Fuel planning is the actual nutrition piece where I pull in my job as a dietitian, which is to help you get acquainted with your body's needs based on your goal.
But, it’s important to note that I wait to guide you through fuel planning in the fourth step because you need steps one, two, and three - otherwise, it’s just another diet.
Oftentimes I have clients say, well, I just want the fuel plan. And yes, if you've done the work before, a fuel plan can be incredibly helpful. But if you haven't, this is just another list of what you should be eating - and that's not what we're here for.
The trick here is looking at these fuel groups through a lens of neutrality. An observational stance, rather than a judgmental stance. And this is game changing.
Now, we're staying out of the diet culture mentality. We are no longer getting stuck in this idea that we have to eat a certain way, we should do this, we shouldn't do that. Rather, it is pure curiosity. We're learning, and we're taking nutrition science and overlapping it with our body's biofeedback and lining it up with our values.
STep #5: The Empowered Eating Framework
The fifth step in the Empowered Eating Framework - braiding it all together with grit, grace, and adaptability. This is where we really move out of our comfort zone into that continual learning and growth stage.
We balance grace, like giving ourselves permission to learn, mess up, and grow. There's grace upon grace upon grace in this process. And if you find yourself losing that, that's your cue that there's some diet culture remnants still stuck in your brain because really at the end of the day, it's like, if you don't eat, like, so what?
You're still going to sleep at night. Your body is still going to wake up tomorrow and you're going to be okay. And that's the truth. Our body is incredibly resilient. It can handle your imperfect eating. It really can.
So we can give ourselves that grace - and at the same time, you've got that grit inside of you.
When we maintain that posture of curiosity, we grow every single time we have a setback - and then nothing is wasted. It's like, yeah, so you ate some stuff, you didn't feel great, and it didn't get you the goal you were trying to work towards.
We learn from each setback and now we can move on. We have information, and we can move on. We maintain that lens of neutrality so you don't fall victim to getting stuck in the diet mentality ever again.
If you are ready to dive into empowered eating on a deeper level and really get granular with this five step framework, I’d love for you to join me inside the Empowered Eating Method.
This podcast is here to support you weekly, but it only scratches the surface. For more info on how you can become an empowered eater grab my FREE MASTERCLASS on how to become confident in your body without obsessing over food at jessbrownrd.com. Don’t forget to join me right here next Monday… where I can’t wait to fuel your awesome.
Cheers, and happy eating!