Hello, everybody, and welcome to a new episode of the Awaken Together podcast.
I'm Kat, and today in this very special episode, I'm joined with my friend, Jack Golden.
Welcome, Jack.
Thank you.
I'm excited to be here.
Thanks for being here.
Today, we're going to be talking all about intuitive eating, and we figured what better
time of year to have this episode than the day after Thanksgiving, with food being just
very prevalent in our lives, heading into the holiday season.
Jack just has so much good insight and experience in this topic.
So to give a little background on Jack, she has an intuitive eating body image coach,
a yoga teacher, and a dietetic student right now.
And Jack, I remember you and I actually met, I think it was when we first started teaching
at Black Swan, right?
Yeah.
I got how many years has that been now?
Like three or so years ago?
Yeah.
I remember meeting you in the studio and then finding out we both were into health coaching
and just like had a lot in common.
So I was really happy to come across you there.
Yeah.
And that kind of just blossomed into a beautiful friendship of healthy dates and connecting
on coaching and kind of this like niche that we found ourselves in, like similar but different
with me and holistic health coaching and you and intuitive eating.
And just, I remembered learning so much from you and your approach and your group programs
and everything you were creating was really inspiring for me.
So just remember.
Thanks.
Of course.
So for anybody who intuitive eating as a concept is new to, I know it's very prevalent and
like the health and wellness space, I'd say right now in the past couple of years, but
for anybody who this is a new concept to, could you please share what is intuitive eating?
Yeah.
So I kind of like to think of intuitive eating as a methodology that people follow or more
so like a lifestyle because it does go beyond just like the way you eat food.
And so intuitive eating was actually coined by two dietitians back in the 90s.
So although it's really popular right now, it has actually been around for probably close
to 30 years now and was originally created in a way to really to be used as treatment
for eating disorder.
And it started to expand from there into like I said, a methodology and a lifestyle really
that can be applied to anybody.
So if you think about from a very simple concept of what it is, babies are our most intuitive
eaters.
I'm actually experiencing this right now with my infant and basically they know when
they're hungry, they know when they're full, they know what they want to eat, they know
how much they want to eat and they stop when they're satisfied.
And that is like the most basic view of it is really trusting your internal cues.
So there are 10 principles of intuitive eating and if you become an intuitive eater, typically
would work through the 10 principles that have to do with like mindful eating, lots
of mindset works.
There's a lot of involvement around your mental state, the way you interact with your thoughts.
There is a principle around movement.
So outside of food, how we have a relationship with our body and movement and whatnot.
But yeah, on a basic level, it is a framework of trusting your internal cues in your body.
So instead of listening to external, dieting is very prevalent these days.
We all know that especially around the holidays.
So instead of having a diet, tell you how much to eat, what ingredients are okay.
You really rebuild a connection with your own body and your own intuitive wisdom.
So there's that intuitive piece comes in and it's relying on your intuition around what
food sounds good.
How much of that food you want, understanding when you are satisfied and the meal is complete.
So that we, yeah, basically just coming back to our intuition when it comes to food.
That's incredible.
And I mean, it seems so obvious, right?
Yes.
An important tool for us to all build a relationship with in our lives.
Like we're all born with it, but somewhere along the way, we're just taught to ignore
our body's cues.
Yeah.
Like if you think about it, like think about kids.
If you've ever been around toddlers, you've probably heard their parents complain like,
I can't get them to eat anything.
All they want to do is snack all day.
Like I can't get them to sit down for a meal.
They eat and they want to leave and play.
And you know, there could be some underlying other things going on there.
But kids know, you know, we're born with this wisdom of understanding like, okay, I've had
a few bites or I need one more bite and then I'm satisfied and I'm done and I can get up
and walk away from my plate.
And that is just like, unfortunately, probably kind of rare for adults.
You hear people say like, oh, I need to stop, you know, when they're eating as if they don't
have any control over what they put into their body.
And so it is something that we have to come back to and relearn.
We're all born with it.
So you have that wisdom.
We've been there before.
It's really our society and our societal views around food and body image and health that
have really taken us away from intuitive eating.
Totally.
And a word that you said, control.
I think this is so prevalent as it relates to food.
And just speaking for myself back in high school, I really struggled with an eating disorder
myself and intuitive eating was so far from my mind.
Just as a concept, obviously I didn't know it existed back then as like a methodology.
But I was just constantly looking outside myself for diets and like diet pills and all
sorts of different ways to control and restrict and prevent myself from eating because it
is so intertwined with our self-worth and body image.
And there's just so much of that.
So it makes complete sense and like the most healing way possible that this is created
to help heal eating disorders.
Just like that mind, body connection and getting just back into our bodies and that beautiful
remembering like you said of what we all came onto this earth here with knowing.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm like, well, it's helpful for individuals who have struggled with a disorder of eating,
which I think a lot of people start to just think about like control and restriction.
It's really helpful for people who have struggled with binge eating in the past.
It's honestly, I think it's helpful for people who have like zero appetite for certain things.
There's really a practice for anywhere and everywhere and it is, I like to think for
someone like yourself who is like focused on holistic health, it really intertwines that
mind and body piece together.
So I think it's a practice for every single person, whether they think they struggle with
food or not.
It's really a beautiful practice of coming home to your own body, having a pretty strong
connection to your body and your intuition and who doesn't want that, right?
So I think it's definitely becoming more popular as it becomes a practice that everyone can
adopt not just individuals who are working on their relationship with food.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I just love it.
I love that it exists.
I think it's one of those beautiful healing tools that is led with compassion and self-trust.
And I think there's a lot of tools out there that like even like intermittent fasting, like
for example, my mom has been trying this recently and she's been telling me about it.
And it's not something that I have decided to ever do for myself because I don't love
the idea of denying my body food when it's hungry because to me that just slips into a
dangerous place of old familiar patterns and habits that really just make me feel right.
Sure, like I've heard it does work for some people and so I'm not here to prescribe one
thing or another to anybody.
But I think any tool that leads with compassion and just trusting your internal cues, like
that's a really positive thing and like a light should go off in our heads of like the
ones that are positive and the ones that like maybe we should think twice about.
Totally agree and trust is a really big piece of it because unfortunately as the diet world
continues to grow and becomes it was already like a $70 billion industry and you know,
the holidays by the time most people are listening to this, it's going to be like at the forefront
and really shove down people's throats.
And so that is the time when we need to all work on rebuilding trust and kind of put that
into our forefront of our minds because if you are someone who has like relied on diets
in the past, if they were meant to work, there wouldn't be so many of them, right?
You know, there's always a new diet coming out and it's because they're not meant to
last, they don't work and we're always seeking something and seeking externally and seeking
honestly validation and prescription and rules to follow.
And so yeah, I would agree the whole piece on empathy and rebuilding trust are like really
key for me because that's something that I had to do for myself too that I was really
missing.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
So thinking about your work with people, can you share about what you've helped people
with in the past as an intuitive eating coach?
Yeah.
So I have helped clients with a range of issues.
So people typically come towards me and my work because they feel either out of control
around food, they feel like they have obsessive thoughts.
So things maybe we could categorize under disordered eating patterns, meaning they're
not participating in bodily harm and like active restriction, like an active eating
disorder.
However, they feel uncomfortable in their relationship with food, whether that's, like
I said, obsessive thoughts, feeling out of control around food, having some distrust
with their body, not being able to tap into their own intuition, like really not being
able to even dictate what an internal cue is.
The further we get away from that, unfortunately, the harder it can be to hear those internal
cues.
And so I've helped people who have recovered from an active eating disorder, but feel like
they're in kind of that like quasi recovery stage where they're no longer harming themselves,
but they still don't feel really comfortable.
Food doesn't feel easy for them.
So a lot of the people would describe, food is hard, food is complicated, food is messy
for me.
I don't feel safer on myself.
I don't feel comfortable in my own skin with my body size.
And that leads to food.
People want to overcompensate with exercise and kind of get into these different, pretty
common mentalities like around earning and burning food.
Those are just some of the like thoughts that tend to come up a lot with clients that I've
worked with.
So I would say that's kind of on a larger scale things that I've helped people with.
And on some like smaller wins, for instance, I know specifically I've helped a client who
wanted to eat one of her favorite foods again.
It had gotten to a point, she loves chips.
And I've gotten to a point where she wasn't allowing herself to buy chips, have chips.
She felt completely out of control and lost around that specific food.
And so I got her to a place where she could have chips in the house, have a few different
times, eat them when she wanted to, had like enough, felt like she didn't need to have
them every single day, really get her to a place of neutrality.
So that's kind of an aim I'm working for with people is get them to a place where food is
pretty neutral.
It doesn't hold so much power over individuals.
Food becomes easy.
It doesn't require as much thought as we've put into it before.
So I would say that's kind of the big goal most people have is they want food to be
easy.
They don't want to be stuck in their thoughts around it all the time.
And that looks different for everybody for one person and chips for another person and
dessert.
And they wanted to be able to have cookies in the house and be able to enjoy cookies
without binging on them because they had a history of emotional eating and binge eating.
So getting people to a place where they can enjoy food again and not be in a spiral mentally
during that time is one of my favorite things.
And I'm so grateful to be able to help people with that.
Yeah, it's amazing.
And I think like for folks who haven't personally experienced this, they might hear us talking
about like chips and cookies and like, you know, the control that they have over your
lives and not totally understand it.
But for folks like us who have been there and have experienced Disordered Eating, just
that freedom to not have, you know, we have thousands of thoughts every single day to not
have so many of them be centered around control and food.
Like that is life changing.
So it's really important.
Yeah, that like term freedom, like I would say you might see it and are changed with
intuitive eating on social media platforms, people reference food freedom, because that's
really what the word gives you.
Like you said, we have so many thoughts a day.
I know there's been times in my life where I've spent 70% of my day thinking about food,
whether it was thinking about what I had eaten earlier and making myself either feel bad
about it or obsessing over how much I ate, thinking about future meals.
It was constantly like backtracking what I had eaten, doing mental calculations to prepare
for what I could eat for the next few meals.
It became obsessive when I started to have plans with friends around food.
Like the amount of time I spent in my day thinking about food and it typically being
in a negative headspace that really does start to take a toll on you.
So I would say one of the biggest things that this does aside from allowing you to like
keep chips in your house, like you said, is really to have that freedom and that mental
clarity.
And I know that's something when I first started this work on my own journey, right?
Because that's what led me here is I had to do this work myself is I needed that mental
space back.
I'm a busy person.
I don't have time to be spending that much time thinking about something so trivial and
it didn't have the availability.
And I was missing out on a lot in my life because of how much time I was obsessing over
it.
And so I needed that time back.
I wanted to be free.
And I would say that probably resonates for a lot of people too.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
Do you remember like, did you have one moment or something?
Like what led you to that moment of like, okay, something has to give and was the catalyst
for you to make a change?
Yeah.
So in college, I had an undiagnosed eating disorder and kind of went to go see help.
Didn't really get the help I needed, but got myself to a place where I was no longer
like actively harming myself.
Kind of got my way to a study point.
And from there, I just basically like fell into disordered eating patterns, which I know
it sounds kind of confusing for people who might be a little bit new or not fully understand
the clinical side of things.
But my weight was steady, I was still eating, but my mental state was horrible.
And some of my behaviors were not super healthy and really just time consuming, I describe.
And after I graduated from college, I moved to Austin and I was living in Austin for a
few years.
And I just remember I worked at a startup.
I didn't, I had roommates.
I didn't have a whole lot of money.
And I had a boyfriend at the time and he had a great relationship with food.
I remember there being really specific moments where we would like go get a bagel and cream
cheese, which I love a bagel and cream cheese.
Like, and it needs to have a ton of cream cheese, but he would eat it and like, he would
just eat it and go about his day.
And he wouldn't talk about it and he enjoyed it.
And I started to think I was like, I wonder if he's having the thoughts that I'm having.
I'm eating this bagel and I'm telling myself, I can't have any bread for the rest of the
day.
No more carbs.
I definitely need to exercise.
Like, basically trying to compensate because I thought that eating that bagel was bad.
And so I started to realize that like, oh, there's people around me who don't have these
kind of thoughts and seeing him have a good relationship with food kind of led me to be
like, oh, can it, can it be different than this?
And around the same time, I also started to get extremely stressed out about going out
with friends.
You know, this was the first time in my life that I was living pretty independently and
like making my own money and making new friends.
The more people wanted to go out together in Austin, the more I felt myself starting
to like stay home and kind of hibernate a little because I was scared of the food because
I wanted to wake up early in the morning and exercise because I wasn't okay during the
day if I didn't exercise and exercising was a method of control for myself.
I didn't want to go out and drink with people because I was worried about calories and the
alcohol and it really kept me from having a good time.
And honestly, the people around me were probably the ones that opened up my eyes that, oh, what
I'm doing is not normal.
Other people aren't really living this way.
And this is starting to be a bit consuming.
So that was kind of the catalyst to the work.
And I will say it took me a while to be ready, which everyone has to come to it in their own
way.
But I did start to notice and realize that I was getting exhausted.
I just, you know, I eventually started going out with people and trying.
And then I just realized that my, although I could change my behaviors, I could go out
with people.
I could go to dinner with friends.
I just found my thoughts to be so consuming.
Like you were saying, I just, I needed that mental freedom and I didn't have that.
So that led me to really realize something has to change.
I can't live like this forever because it's consuming and it's going to keep me from doing
other things in my life.
Thank you so much for sharing that.
You know, it's real.
It's vulnerable.
It's hard.
And I think that a lot of listeners will be able to actually resonate with your message
and your experience when you shared.
So thank you for that.
And it's beautiful also that like those people around you and your life at that time could
act as expanders and inspire you to, of what's possible, right?
How people can eat a bagel and cream cheese and not feel bad.
And I think that's like so not even within the realm of possibility when you're so in
that place that we do sometimes need to look outward and see that other people can do this
and be like, okay, well, they can do it.
I can do it.
Totally.
And I think sharing details of stories and experiences is so important because, you know,
that's how I found intuitive eating.
And I found it through somebody else who had basically been down the same road I had been
and she had been practicing intuitive eating and started to share with others and create
just like a community for support through the whole process.
And that's where, where I found it.
And I realized, wow, like there's a lot of people who have been living the same life
that I've been living and it doesn't have to be this way and seeing her on the other
side, having gone through the work and really putting in the effort to heal her relationship
with food.
I realized it was possible.
And so I always share because I know there's people out there struggling right now, especially
this time of year.
It is so hard.
And so I want people to hear the story and hear the message and know that people have
walked that same road ahead of you and they are already there.
And so I hope that in sharing, I'm an open look anyway, but I hope that in sharing that
it just inspires other people to know that there is another path forward in life and
things don't always have to be this messy with food.
Yeah, such an important message.
Thank you for that.
And in thinking about like that shift from being in that place where a bagel and cream
cheese was scary and having to work out and just have that really influence your life
to finding intuitive eating through that girl and diving into it yourself.
I'm curious now, what would you say intuitive eating has done for you?
Intuitive eating has honestly changed the whole trajectory of my life.
I originally went to school to study art and art history and started working in the creative
field and upon finding intuitive eating, well, let me backtrack.
I do think that I was meant to be a helper in some capacity.
I've always been attracted to teaching yoga, I got my yoga teaching certificate, got my
health coaching certificate.
There's always been something in me that was wanting to help other people.
And sadly that came in the form of like giving diet advice back in college when I was in
the throws, you know, I was like, oh, well, I can lose weight.
I can manipulate my body.
Let me teach others how to do it.
Let me help others who want that too.
So I've always kind of had this capacity to want to lead others.
I'm passionate about leadership and want to help everyone.
And so finding intuitive eating, because it changed my life so much and really woke me
up, I was like, I think this is the path that I want to take.
This is going to be how I help people.
This is going to be my legacy pretty much.
And not just that.
Do you know a human design, Jack?
I don't.
I know my, an eagram and a little bit of my birth chart, but I don't know my human design.
Okay, we'll have to look at that.
Yeah, yeah, I'd be curious.
I resonate too.
Yeah, but I just like have always wanted to lead and help people.
And so I kind of went back and forth for a few years on like how to do that.
And so that's where the coaching aspect came from is like really being there as a guide
for others.
And then through that, I realized I want more clinical experience.
I want to help people on a larger scale.
So that's when I decided to go back to school and pursue my master's in nutrition and dietetics
to become a registered dietitian.
So I am in school right now getting my master's and really learning all the key things I need
in order to help people with this, even, you know, even better in the future.
So finding intuitive eating honestly really changed my life because I don't know what
I'd be doing career wise.
If I hadn't found it so I'm grateful that it kind of gave me that push and I do feel
very fulfilled knowing I'll go back to school and can build a long term dietetics practice
around it.
Yeah, that's so awesome.
And what a beautiful time in your life to have found it too because now you know, like
you're on your path to help others even deeper in these ways and your mom.
And I can only imagine how helpful intuitive eating was in that knowledge during pregnancy
and seeing your body change and all these ways and all of that.
Absolutely.
Yeah, so I have always known that I wanted to be a mom and have a family and in part
that was like part of my like push to heal too.
As I said, this stuff can often be generational and like you were talking about your mom is
doing intermittent fasting like it's just we share that you know, if you know, the messaging
that moms get around their bodies and honestly just women and society.
We passed that down to our children and I said I don't want to do that.
I don't want my thoughts and my behaviors and my beliefs around my body and my food.
I don't want that to be passed down to my kids.
So that really gave me the push to know I needed to do this and make these changes in
order to have a happy family in the future.
And so I'm very grateful that I put in the work and it was incredibly helpful when it
came time to have a kid because let me tell you that going through pregnancy is wild.
The hunger changes, the changes to your appetite alone and the changes to your body and the
fact that you kind of have to be open and have acceptance because you just don't know
what's going to come your way.
They can try to you know, predict, you know, your weight gain.
They can try to tell you what symptoms are going to experience or food aversion.
You might have but it really is different for everybody.
And so the fact that I had already gone through this work and was in a comfortable place when
the time came that I had severe food aversions and I'm not kidding you for like two to three
weeks, all I could eat were crackers.
That's all I could eat and previous me probably would have spiraled.
I would have said I need my vegetables.
I need my fruit.
I need to eat things that are, I can't see them, quote unquote healthy.
I can't eat things that are unhealthy for too long or my body's going to change.
My health is going to fail.
And so being in a place where I can accept this is the season that I'm in, my body will
be okay.
I will have fruits and vegetables again in the future.
It's okay if I don't for a time period.
Let me trust my body and trust what my body is meeting right now.
Let me respect my body by giving it what it feels best.
That was buttered noodles for a little while.
That was honestly simple carbs.
All I could eat was simple carbs for a while.
So I needed to be in a place mentally where I was okay with that because aside from feeling
sick and sick to your stomach and nauseous all day long, since it's not just the morning,
you also don't really want to be worried about the food you're eating because you're already
worried about your body and your baby and you just want to feel better.
So the fact that I didn't have to worry about the food piece, the fact that I didn't have
to worry about and stress that, oh, my boobs are getting a little bit bigger, my butt seems
a little bit wider, my stomach has gotten really soft.
The fact that I didn't have to harp on that and I could fully be present and be in a space
where I was excited to welcome a child and not just be concerned about the way my body
was changing but really focus on the beautiful things that my body was doing for my baby
and trusting it.
I went through all the pregnancy with a mantra that my body knows what it's doing and I trust
my body and I trust my biology, meaning my body regulates itself.
It gains the weight that it needs.
It gains the weight and puts it where it needs.
It holds on to fat as it needs.
I am eating these foods because this is what my body needs from me right now and being
in a place where I can be fully accepting of that and trusting in that and respecting
intuition, respecting those cues was absolutely crucial and made for not only a pleasant pregnancy
but similarly postpartum because feeding yourself when you have a newborn is very, very difficult.
You have to let other people feed you or let my husband co-pay, let people bring us food.
We got takeout way more often than normal.
It brings me back to things that probably would have stressed me out and made me spiral
out of control mentally years ago and now I'm in a place where I'm fully accepting this
as my season of life.
I can focus on my child and not really worry about the fact that I've had pasta fight nights
this week.
It's been really, really helpful in this season.
That's incredible.
You have a healthy baby too.
Yes, happy healthy guy.
All right.
I would so much rather be thinking about him and thinking, honestly, not even thinking.
I want my time spent out of my head fully present with him, watching him grow because
everything he does right now is so cool and so fun to watch.
If I had been in a place where I was just living in my thoughts and couldn't escape
my own thoughts, I feel like I'd be missing out on so much.
Totally, totally.
I'm so happy for you.
It's just amazing.
The mental space that you save to be present with him by doing that work.
I mean, that's everything.
Yes, it is.
Yes, good.
Well, could you please share your best tips and resources for folks who are interested
in intuitive eating and maybe also something also you mentioned is the body love.
I know they go hand in hand, but you've also led amazing workshops on body positivity,
body love in the past.
Just any tips that you have on the two would be amazing.
Yes.
I think first and foremost, maybe while the two are so interconnected, try to just pick
one to work on it first because it can feel like a lot to work on them both simultaneously.
It can be really overwhelming.
They're so intertwined, but I do think maybe getting yourself to a place where you have
trust and respect for your body first because body love is a really big concept.
Most of us may not get to a place where we love our body and that's okay.
It's not really an end goal.
It's kind of more something fluid.
You might move through at times, but I always think of a formula of building up to that.
First you have to have trust.
In order to have trust, you have to have acceptance.
We go through acceptance, trust, respect, and then maybe to love.
First having acceptance around your body.
You don't have to like it, but we do want to accept it.
So getting to a place where you can accept that in order to rebuild some trust.
And then once we've rebuilt trust with our body, that can morph into respect.
But I think being in a place where you have acceptance and trust around your body is a
really great place to then enter the intuitive eating realm because you can actually trust
the signals that your body is sending you.
And then even like taking it a step back.
How much somebody like even wrap their head around starting to accept their body?
Yeah.
So a couple of different things come to mind for that.
Definitely spending more time connecting with your body.
A lot of us are incredibly disconnected, meaning we spend way too much time in our
heads.
We don't do activities that bring us closer.
We don't spend time looking at ourselves touching ourselves.
We just are kind of like below the neck.
There's just like a line of separation.
And so we want to start working with the reconnection.
So whether that's slowing down every so and so throughout the day to reconnect, put your
hand on your belly and just take a big deep breath.
I find that to be really helpful with some mantras.
Like I said, I trust my biology was one that I used throughout my pregnancy.
So finding one that works for you.
Also doing a little bit more digging into help at every size.
That is, you know, a whole nother topic for another podcast.
But how did every size is the idea that you can be healthy at any size?
And I know sometimes we get so wrapped up in our size and in our health because the
world has told us healthy only looks like one size.
And in order to be healthy, we have to control and manipulate and shrink.
And so really getting a better understanding of what goes into health and how we find ways
to be healthy outside of just food, exercise and our body size.
And then lastly, and this is going to be a piece of advice on the intuitive eating side
to just like really helpful, especially this time of year.
Social media is something that I think can be really beautiful for this community because
you can find people on the same journey.
You can find people who really promote intuitive eating, who promote body acceptance, who talk
about food freedom.
But on the flip side, you can also find a lot of really, really negative space online
too and the diet talk and the basically just everything being so fake online too, right?
All the filters and there's a lot of harm that can be done at the same time that there
can be a lot of good.
And so something that I think people can do as they're working towards body acceptance
and if they want to start kind of learning a little bit more about intuitive eating and
maybe starting to explore it, it might be the right path for them is to go through your
own social media and notice when you come across people's pages or posts that kind of
just make you feel icky and whether that's an immediate like thought in comparison to
somebody else or an immediate thought that is a negative thought you have about yourselves
or what you're doing in life and what you're eating or you just feel it in your gut.
You notice your mood starts to change.
Those are the people you want to unfollow.
That's the content you don't want to take in anymore, whether it's blocking a hashtag.
I'm following muting people, maybe just trying to like stay away from that sort of material
and then start to refill your feed with people who post about food freedom, people who talk
about food neutrality, people who talk about body acceptance and then starting to incorporate
more people that look like you.
I don't think a lot of us realize how often we are following influencers and people on
Instagram that look nothing like us.
They don't have a body type like us.
They don't have a lifestyle like us.
They're just really out of touch with our own reality.
I get that that can be fun at times, but finding more people who look like you, who have a
lifestyle similar to yours, a body type similar to yours, a body type bigger than yours, a
body type that's a different color, that has different abilities, really diversifying your
feed and seeing that exposure all the time and looking at people living their life.
I think that can help us get ourselves back down in reality and start to set the foundation
around us for acceptance.
Well said.
And such great tips.
Thank you.
You mentioned a couple of resources here and there, like the intuitive eating book, a couple
social media people.
So could you share some resources for folks interested in learning more about these topics?
Yeah.
So intuitive eating, there's actually a website for intuitive eating.
There's a book and a workbook, which I think is really, really helpful.
I've read it a couple times and I've gone through the workbook, but that's something
that is interactive.
You do some journaling and it really starts to lay the foundation for work.
You can also on social media, start searching the hashtag intuitive eating or help at every
size and start finding individuals who are posting about that to follow.
I post about it from time to time on my own.
If you are into yoga, there is a book called yoga for body image and there's the body
image yoga and body image coalition online.
There are numerous like groups and coaches and so many people online in this space.
There's also this resource I like that might speak to some people a little bit more.
They try not to spend so much time on social media.
There's actually a subreddit for intuitive eating, which I have spent some time on, but
not only like asking questions, but also providing some advice for people who get on there and
ask questions.
So it's a nice little online community.
There's also a help at every size book.
There's honestly so many books and so many research studies that support this evidence
based theory.
But I would say finding the hashtags on social media is a really good place to start finding
individuals.
One dietician that lives in Austin that I really like to follow.
Her name is Mallory J. Page and she also has a podcast called seems like diet culture.
If you like podcasts, you might check that one out and then another podcast by Kristi
Harrison called the wellness trap.
She also does a newsletter, but she's a dietician who's been practicing this for a long time
and has written a few books, which I know are growing a lot at you right now.
But I'm looking up at my bookshelf right now looking at the books and she she has a really
good book called anti diet.
And that one is a really good read.
If you're like, let me explore this, not quite ready to do any work, but I'm curious.
Anti diet dives into actually the history of dieting and it provides a lot of helpful
context to the history, basically how we got to where we are with the diet industry and
how we got to where we are with body image and the struggles that most women face.
And so that is a really good book that's eye opening and may spark a little bit of curiosity
and it certainly sparked a fire in me to want to dive in deeper.
So I think that one could kind of start getting the wheels turning at anybody's meeting a
little motivation to do the work because I know how hard it is to get started on such
a difficult journey.
Amazing.
Thank you so much for sharing those.
I feel like so many different ways to tap in on different platforms, whether it's online
or books.
So there's just no shortage of tools out there.
So thank you for sharing your favorites.
Definitely trust those ahead of others.
Yeah.
And how can our listeners connect with you?
Yeah.
So I am on Instagram.
It's Jack J.C.Q.
I know most people want to throw K in there, but J.C.Q.
Dot Golden is my Instagram.
That's pretty much where I'm at most of the time these days.
And then I think you could also probably search my name in Apple Podcast.
I've done a few other interviews too.
So other ways to hear about kind of what's going on in the intuitive meeting space and
find more resources.
But that's my Instagram.
And yeah.
Thank you.
And to all of our listeners, we know this episode's coming out on Black Friday, the
day after Thanksgiving.
So I just wanted to share, even if you didn't intuitively eat yesterday, like it's a holiday.
Even if you ate past the point of fullness, please don't punish yourself today, this
weekend or ever, and just try to really get back to your body.
And that energy of gratitude that this whole season is about.
The fact that we have a body that we get to live in is something that brings me peace
all the time.
And I sure as hell want to spend this one life I have in this one body I have loving
it.
So the work might be hard.
I agree.
Worth it.
It is absolutely worth it.
And with that being said, the timing of this was honestly perfect timing for a staffer's
conversation.
And I just want to remind people the holiday season is extremely hard.
And coming your way is not your fault.
There's a lot of money in the diet industry in there.
I take advantage of this time of year, but I want to remind you all that you have survived
it year over year.
You have overcome this time.
It does pass.
But all the more reason to kind of do a little deep dive this time of year and figure out
where you'd want to be next time during the holiday season and maybe let that be a
motivator to kind of start to explore and ask yourself some of the harder questions.
What a good way to track that growth each holiday season.
You can always come back.
Yeah.
Well, thank you so much, Jack.
It's been such a treat talking with you today about this amazing topic.
Yeah.
Thank you so much for having me.
Yeah, of course.
And thank you everybody for listening.
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