Welcome to the last post of this series all about Food Talk Voices.
The final step to finding your intuitive eating voice is to embrace and develop the supportive, incredibly helpful voices: the nurturer and the food anthropologist.
These voices are the ones that give you the compassion and reflection to really feel confident in saying goodbye to the Food Police.
They often come last because soooo many of us haven’t been taught how to say nice things to ourselves and to treat ourselves like we would our best friend or kids.
So let’s start practicing!
Nurturer
✔ Gets you through tough times.
✔ Gentle.
✔ Soothing qualities.
✔ Ability to reassure you that you’re okay and that everything will turn out fine.
✔ No pressure or scolding tones.
✔ Not critical or judgemental.
✔ The voice for most of the positive self-talk in your head.
Have you met her?
You’ve probably used this voice when comforting your own kids or perhaps when you’re helping your best friend with a difficult situation.
BUT we struggle to use this voice with ourselves.
When’s the last time you felt like you had understanding and patience for yourself?
Talk to yourself like you would to someone you love.
Brene Brown
Practice:
- Check in with your feelings and validate them
- What would I say to my kids or a friend who thought this about themselves?
- Express appreciation
- Daily affirmations
Once you develop your nurturer voice you can use it across many areas of your thoughts and it can help you combat dichotomous or binary thinking (which is trained in diet culture), absolutist, catastrophic and pessimistic thinking, as well as negative self-talk.
this is HUGE!
What it does for you in the realm of food talk:
- Challenges the food police
- Supports you compassionately
- Provides coping statements for the awful criticisms from the food police and diet rebel.
It might sound like:
- It’s a scary feeling to want to eat everything in sight. That’s ok. It’s normal to feel this way when you’re extremely hungry.
- I ate past my fullness. I know my body can deal with this discomfort and it’s going to be ok. I am curious about what I may have been feeling that could have made me need more food to comfort myself.
Food Anthropologist
Anthropology is the study of what makes us human.
The food anthropologist is a neutral observer that can give you a distant perspective and honest curiosity to understand your relationship with food and hunger.
One more time, the food anthropologist is neutral (read: non judgemental (notice the theme 👀)).
It’s not the voice that tells you you’re an idiot for skipping breakfast or that you didn’t earn that piece of chocolate cake (this is what the food police sounds like – full of judgement!).
The food anthropologist keeps you connected to your inner signals both biologically and psychologically.
Practice:
- Slow down, take a deep breath
- Try to be present with a neutral attitude
- Notice what is happening
- If you feel emotions popping up acknowledge that they exist
Sometimes if you’ve spent years deep in diet culture, weight cycling or restrictive dieting you may need a third party to play this neutral, impartial role until you get more practice with non-judgemental thoughts.
What it does for you in the realm of food talk:
- Gives you clues into what drives your eating.
- Helps sort through the facts instead of getting caught up in the emotions of eating.
- Keeps you in touch with your inner signals.
It might sound like:
- I skipped breakfast and was extremely hungry at 10 am.
- I experienced guilt after eating dessert with dinner.
Can you feel how neutral and factual it is? That’s what you’re aiming for.
The key to developing and embracing these voices is practicing non-judgemental self-talk.
It’s taken you years, maybe even decades of practice to get this good at negative self-talk, be patient with yourself as you work to unravel this and build your supportive positive self-talk.
If you’re looking for support and accountability to find your intuitive eating voice the FED Mamas program might be for you.
The FED Mamas program is the most supportive program to help you end generational diet culture, reconnect with your body and find food freedom.
AND…. doors are open until September 25th, 2022!
Send me an email or book a discovery call if you’re interested in learning more.
Thank you so much for being here. ♥
With kindness and compassion,
Lindsay