The Course: Eat for Life

Eat for Life:

The Mindful Eating Exploration

Eat for Life is a 10 week mindfulness-based intuitive eating program that will empower you to create a trusting relationship with food, your mind and body. Food can once again be a source of pleasure, rather than guilt or shame.

You Can Make Peace With Food

Eat for life offers a non-diet approach to eating, advocating a kind, compassionate orientation toward yourself and your body as the first steps toward making shifts in behavior.

This 10 week educational program combines the basics of mindful eating, principles of intuitive eating, mindfulness practice and relevant research to make sense of the confusing messages about what, when and how to eat.

Participants discover the pleasure of taking care of themselves in ways that nourish and heal.

How does Eat for Life Work?

In 90 minute classes that meet weekly for 10 weeks, you'll explore intuitive eating principles and learn mindfulness practices. Group discussions will examine experiential components, teaching and readings will relate mindfulness and research to shifts in your relationship between food and your body. As you learn the practice of mindfulness through meditation and gentle movement, it gets easier to distinguish between physical and emotional feelings, allowing you to gain a sense of "body wisdom".

Coming to class regularly and doing the mindfulness practice and readings at home (setting aside 15-20 minutes per day) are vital aspects of the course. This is how you'll develop mindfulness skills, which can be applied to eating behavior and thoughts about eating. Audio files of guided meditations and a home practice workbook will be provided. The required text book, Intuitive Eating by Tribole and Resch, is available through book sellers.

What Benefits Can I Expect?

Increased body appreciation
Decreased psychological symptoms
Decreased problematic eating, like binge eating

Jan Chozen Bays MD, author of Mindful Eating, says, "what you could lose is the weight of the mind's unhappiness with eating and dissatisfaction with food. What you could gain are a simple joy with food and an easy pleasure in eating that are your birthright as a human being."

Can I lose weight with Eat for Life?

With true Intuitive Eating, the focus is NEVER on weight - gain or loss. We do not talk about weight, nor do we count anything. The invitation is to develop attunement to the wisdom of the body - to know what, when and how much to eat.

Eat for life is not a weight loss program . . . It IS an ANTI-DIET Program

Of course, you may walk through the door with the hope and plan to lose weight, and what will keep you from leaving is your deep knowing that diets do not work - or you would not be here. In fact, you'll be asked to give up dieting and begin re-learning to rely on your body's messages. These signals may be faint in the beginning. As you develop more sensitivity and kind curiosity, you'll be amazed at what your own body can tell you.. As children, we all could do this. Its time to reclaim this amazing super power!

Will Intuitive Eating work for me?

Is Eat for Life Right for Me?

Do you often eat when you're not hungry?
Do you often eat to numb or pacify emotions?
Do you often eat to reward or comfort yourself?
Do you often use food to deal with stress?
Do you have rigid rules about "healthy eating"?
Do you sometimes feel out of control with food and eating?
Do you often eat rapidly?
Do you think/worry about food and your body more than you would like to?
Are you exhausted by the diet cycle: lose, gain, lose, gain, repeat?
Do you regularly experience unpleasant emotions before, during or after eating?
Are you considering or have already had weight loss surgery

If you answered Yes to several of these questions, you may benefit from the Eat for Life.

Eat for Life is not another diet - so you cannot fail.

You will be learning how to negotiate the world of food free from the tyranny of diet mentality.

It's a process, not a quick fix. Thank goodness. Someone is telling the truth.

As of March 2020, the course is NOT being offered in person. Stay in touch to learn about online options. Individual sessions enable you to learn and explore all the material, with personally tailored support.

A word of caution. This work is not meant for those who are just beginning to recover from serious disordered eating, like bulimia or anorexia. If you are experiencing active binge/purge eating or severe food restriction, you must be under the care of a mental health professional as well as a physician in order to work with me.