Saturn Returns with Caggie - 4.5 Intuitive Eating with Laura Thomas

Episode Date: October 18, 2021

In this very raw and honest conversation Caggie speaks with Laura Thomas, a nutritionist and author of “Just Eat It” who specialises in intuitive eating. They discuss toxic diet culture, the link between our bodies and our self worth, the societal programming behind it and why we must stop attaching morality to food by calling it 'good' or 'bad'. During our Saturn Return, we have the opportunity to face issues and behaviour patterns that we do not want to carry with us into this new stage of life. Caggie shares the struggles she had with her own body before her Saturn Return, and how ultimately this was the moment when she decided to address these issues and take the steps to create a more harmonious relationship with her body and food. This episode may be triggering for people who suffer from eating disorders. --- Follow or subscribe to "Saturn Returns" for future episodes, where we explore the transformative impact of Saturn's return with inspiring guests and thought-provoking discussions. Follow Caggie Dunlop on Instagram to stay updated on her personal journey and you can find Saturn Returns on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok.  Order the Saturn Returns Book. Join our community newsletter here.  Find all things Saturn Returns, offerings and more here.

Hello everyone and welcome to Saturn Returns with me, Kagi Dunlop. This is a podcast that aims to bring clarity during transitional times where there can be confusion and doubt. If you're thinking about food and kind of like doing this elaborate equation of what you can and can't eat based on what you've already eaten and how much you've exercised that day. That's messed up. My guest today is nutritionist and intuitive eating specialist Laura Thomas. After an undergraduate degree and a PhD, Laura set up her own private nutrition practice. She soon realized that while clients were coming to her asking for meal plans and structure, what they really needed was some help in trusting their own instincts and intuition around food. Intuitive eating has been something that's fascinated me for

quite a long time and it involves learning to understand and recognize internal hunger and fullness cues, but it also requires a lot of unlearning of old, unhelpful food rules and habits that we picked up throughout our lives so that we can reprogram our relationship to food. As you'll hear from this conversation, I have had a bit of a rocky relationship with food and my body. And this is why I wanted to talk to Laura, because it was during my own Saturn Returns experience when I wanted to talk to Laura, because it was during my own Saturn Returns experience when I really decided it was time to address these issues and face them head on. I'm very conscious of never speaking about this stuff on social media, or I don't very often,

because I think it can be a dangerous landscape to start giving out or dishing out, no pun intended, advice on food or nutrition when someone might not be totally healed themselves. So just as a caveat, by no means am I an expert in any capacity in this field or have I got it completely figured out. But I just wanted to share my own personal story because I think one's self-worth can be very wrapped up in our body image and how we feel about the way we look. And this takes a lot of effort to unpin because it's something that's very conditioned and socialized into us. So this is quite a raw and honest conversation. I try and be as open as I possibly can, as always.

and be as open as I possibly can, as always. We discuss toxic diet culture, unattainable beauty standards, and how social media has warped our relationship with food, and how we need to stop talking about good and bad foods, detaching morality from it. Now, some of you may find this episode triggering, so please go easy with yourselves. It definitely unearthed a lot for me. So I would encourage you to journal afterwards and allow whatever emotion may come up. And as always, feel free to send me a message. Often seeking some professional advice for these kind of issues is also very important. But before we get into this episode with Laura, let's hear from our astrological guide, Nora. Saturn has a close connection with our intuition due to its connection

to our root chakra. Among others, it regulates how we feel safe and abundant. And for many of us, we start to disconnect from our most authentic selves when we lose touch with our intuition. Often this is rooted in programming and experiences we've gone through as a child that in turn painted our outlook, not only of life, but also of ourselves. Perhaps we become riddled with shame when we look at our naked bodies in the mirror because we've been taught that it's not virtuous to do so, or vain to do so. Perhaps we obsess over our diet because of a diet culture imposed upon us through the media from a very young age. And then we start to doubt our own body because what if it doesn't meet certain standards and therefore can't possibly ever be enough until we reach this impossible pipe tree. There are so many societal narratives that negatively inform how we treat

ourselves and how we love ourselves, how we nurture and nourish ourselves. And then there's trauma. When we go through trauma and we don't get the adequate support we need to start the process of healing it, we start to live in survival mode to some extent. We disconnect from our body, we disengage from our hearts and intuition because we feel it's not safe to do so. we feel it's vulnerable to do so, and we try to cope by controlling whichever elements of our lives we can in order to be able to function in society and avoid further pain. This is also the case for generational trauma which, as I mentioned, informs our subconscious programming growing up. So unless we get the opportunity to break this cycle, we tend to pivot around never quite achieving the

breakthrough we need in order to love ourselves independently of expectations. And this is when astrology comes in. When Saturn returns and when it activates the part of our charts that awakens self-esteem, our personal values, family values, and so forth, it also brings up all of the wounds related to them. It brings opportunity to take a closer look at them. Sometimes this in itself is incredibly confronting because it usually happens after having hit rock bottom or if a difficult event has happened outside of us. So this forces us to look within. So we ask ourselves, are we counter ourselves? Are we living according to our values? Do we hold ourselves in high esteem?

Do we nourish ourselves with the knowledge and nutrition that will honor our life force? In different ways, we reconsider the truth that we need to speak and eliminate the lies we have ingested for way too long. So I think what might be helpful is to just take a big step back for a second and just think about what we were all like as babies, as young children. We had a real strong connection to our appetite, to the amount and the types of foods that our bodies needed. Like, you know, see a baby calculating their macros in their high tier, right? They really, they will scream and cry when they're hungry. They'll take a little bit of everything. Sometimes they won't eat anything. Sometimes they'll just eat the fruit on their tray. They kind of intuitively have a really good understanding of what their bodies

need. And they've never had a nutrition lesson. They've never been taught anything about food. And they're good at, you know, stopping eating when they're full, and then they will ask again for food when they're hungry again. So we're all born with this innate ability, this like real embodied sense of what we need and what feels good for us right so if we can kind of take that as a given that's most people you know the caveat being if you if you have a chronic illness or something like that that might kind of perturb the signals that our bodies are sending us so if that's our sort of yeah, then in comes all of these confusing and conflicting messages that undermine our body's autonomy.

So I'm sure people listening can remember a time when their parents were like, you have to finish your broccoli before you can have your ice cream. You have to clean your plate. So we get these messages from a really young age and it's not just about food but it's about our bodies and how food relates to our bodies and so something I hear quite often is from clients who've been dancers as kids um and they've been told that they're too big their bodies are too big to do ballet or whatever it might be or gymnastics is another common one and so they we slowly start to internalize the message that if I eat this food and it has this effect on my body then these are

the consequences I'm not going to be worthy or good enough to do this thing that I really love and really enjoy and so we're getting these messages from from a really young age there's a statistic that 30 something percent of five-year-olds I think it's 35 percent of five-year-olds would restrict their intake their food intake to try and lose weight a five-year-old there there are studies that show that parents talk to their children about their weight sort of in a derogatory way from two years old. If we try and teach nutrition concepts to children, because they are like very black and white in their thinking, very all or nothing. If we teach kids that some foods are good foods and some foods are bad foods, but then they go to their friend's house or their grandma's house and there's cake there

and that's bad food. Is grandma bad for giving me that cake am i bad for eating that cake so this is the way that these messages and the shame that's associated with them starts to infiltrate from a really really young age so how i would approach nutrition education with children especially really young children who are black and white thinkers is showing them by what we're eating day in day out this is this is how you balance a meal you don't have to use your words you just show them right there's a bit of protein there's some carbohydrates there's some fats there's some vegetables some fruit dairy whatever or alternatives right and that's how children learn about foods they don't need to learn these like like all-or-nothing concepts and interestingly speaking some of my therapy colleagues who are dealing with eating disorders what they find is that they are seeing more and more young teens

some pre-teens who have had healthy food lessons at school, who then take those messages to the extreme and end up developing eating disorders. Food is ascribed a morality, right? It's either good or bad. And nutrition professionals have a lot to answer for here, because we talk about good carbs and bad carbs and good fats and bad fats and things like that and so it can get very easily muddled but food doesn't have a moral value food is food and so we really need to work on detaching the morality out of food because if we eat a bad food we feel guilty like you've been there right yeah I mean yeah I've definitely I've definitely been there and it creates this I've never really thought about the sort of morality

attachment to food, but it's, it's very present in, in our culture and our society and how then that creates the shame piece, because without that, there wouldn't be the shame that then creates that cycle of, you know, famine and then feast yeah the binge restrict yeah so many people find themselves in yeah which has become kind of normalized totally totally like a lot of what I see in my clinic I know that people are really struggling with like every single day they wake up thinking about food they go to bed thinking about food I once had a client tell me that it felt like it was a source of pride for her if she went to bed hungry at night that's how messed up we are about food

it's so normalized you hear I don't know Janet at the office being like I'm not gonna have cake because I'm being good right or go on then I'm being naughty yeah you hear you hear that but then you also hear the more extremes of literally I mean there's that famous thing in um the devil wears prada when she's like I just don't eat and then when I'm about to faint I eat a piece of cheese and literally people will you know not only normalize that but kind of celebrate it and like laugh at it around yeah and not to really consider the psychological implications of how that's affecting you on on a deeper more visceral level of your sense of self-worth yeah but also literally people cannot function in their day-to-day lives because they're hungry and and I see this all the

time you know I've got low energy I'm bloated I'm you know got sluggish digestion can't poop like all of this stuff and I'm like looking at their food records and I'm like yes because you're not eating enough literally food is energy so you need to make sure that you're eating enough as a as a baseline and weirdly enough when you're well nourished and eating enough some of that psychological stuff takes care of itself because your brain is getting enough calories to think clearly yeah so what are the more psychological pieces to untangle as we kind of go on this journey to intuitive eating because it's not something that people can just suddenly be like oh that's how I'm gonna be practicing from tomorrow and and I think it is helpful to kind of prepare yourself for this before embarking and I don't really love

the word journey but I can't think of anything else there's like before going down this path you you kind of have to like amp yourself up for it and be prepared because it it is counter-cultural first of all so what you're going to come up against is a lot of your friends a lot of your family people around you, maybe your boyfriend, being like, but that's bad for you, or why are you letting yourself eat whatever you want to eat? Like, that's, you know, you're going to have a lot of peer pressure to conform to societal standards, as you say. So what I would say is finding some community, whether that's online, whether that's in person, that can give you that moral support, because yeah in person that can give you that moral support because yeah you're really you're gonna need it so that would be the first thing is

just making sure that you're really well held by other people who get it maybe people who've been through it find yourself a sponsor or something like that you know but once we've kind of worked through a lot of that stuff a lot of people get to a point where like wow it really wasn't about food a lot of this stuff was not about food or my body really is yeah yeah so it's that kind of deeper layer of stuff that I might be referring to therapy or you know finding books or other resources other podcasts that kind of thing that people can help kind of process that next layer of stuff. Because what tends to happen is that when you aren't obsessing about food 12 hours of the day, you have a lot more space. And if you don't know

what to fill that space with, you can go to a dark place sometimes not only that but you're afraid of what's going to occupy the space if it's not being occupied by those neurotic thoughts yeah yeah and that was a big thing for me when I had to look at it I was like okay what is underneath this what are you pushing down what am I pushing down literally pushing down with food and like control what happens if we if we give it space and quite often this is a very blanket generalization it's a feeling of unworthiness and you know from a very young age society is directly and indirectly telling us we're not worthy most of the things we're consuming we most of the things we're we're buying and consuming we're consuming and buying because we think we'll be worthy if we consume and buy them

and so we rarely actually acknowledge that like deeper peace and we don't realizing that we're we're fueling it with all these things all the time and it's a really inconvenient thing to want to actually look at because there's so much shame packaged around it and then over that shame is the packaging of the perfect meals yeah the perfect body the perfect instagram and you just like tap tap tap on that and underneath there's someone that actually feels there's a lot of suffering there's a lot of suffering and it's only really when you can go to that place that you find this kind of deep release of and realization of like the heaviness of what you may have been carrying around you know that thing that's you just got so used to carrying and so what was it for you like when you started looking at this more superficial food

body instagram stuff what helped you get to that deeper level I'd say it was, you know, that Saturn return point in my life where one was that I really didn't want to be in this victimhood mentality. I was victimizing myself. And then also that I, the joy I was denying myself, you know, controlling things in that way and having that framework I had created and I feel many of us do this sort of infrastructure and scaffolding to keep everything tight and in place and essentially striving for perfection yeah an unattainable perfection and it was unsustainable you know I'd be unhappy in situations that were on the unhappiness I was expressing was unmeasured for the situation you know if something like

came out of my yeah and you know that was one of the things that I would have this kind of really intense response to if things felt out of my control and then I think really going back and going to a point of where it stemmed from and trying to resolve some of those emotions and also so to detach from that story you know and where I had picked up from a young age somewhere along the lines that feeling full gave me a sense of feeling loved feeling grounded and really actually when I kind of put a magnifying glass on that I was like why and so those were you know big things I don't know if that answers your question yeah I mean it sounds like you've done loads and loads of work to get to this point and lots of like excavating and yeah figuring out and yeah figuring out what the deep roots of some of the surface level food and body stuff was really about yeah and that's hard it's really really hard it's really hard and to go back

to what we were just discussing the self-worth piece and not only, but the connection between that and self-trust. And I think the intuitive eating, intuitive intuition, full stop, is directly correlated with our ability to trust ourselves, which we disengage from throughout our lives. lives and and if our self-worth or self-esteem is contingent upon a perfect body a perfect diet a perfect instagram that's such a precarious foundation to have a relationship with yourself so precarious and it could just topple like a house of cards at any minute which sounds like you've experienced I mean it's funny that you use that metaphor because I was writing about it and it was like I used that you know that it was a house of cards and and it just came crumbling down do you ever feel like at any point what you were experiencing slipped into an eating disorder or was it yeah yeah so when I was I was very small when I was little like very thin and just small I was just a small human

and I hated that and when everyone developed and you know became a woman. I didn't. And I hated that. And then my parents got divorced when I was 14. And it was a miserable time just because I was 14 and it sucked. And also because, you know, the nest was breaking. Yeah. And my father moved on with someone else quite quickly and quite quickly created something that resembled more of a home and I started to equate a feeling of safety and love with with a lot of food with like food being this thing which had never been before my mom's just very like just eat whatever's in the fridge you know it's not a it's not a thing yeah and it suddenly became this thing and also it was like oh we'll make you know you'll grow if you right yeah so there's massive disconnect between what I intuitively and what my body needed and what I was consuming and then I

didn't change my body didn't change and then suddenly it started changing like a little bit but not in the way that I thought it would it just like I started putting on a little bit of weight not in the right places and not much but it was it was something like oh this can happen to me I don't know if I like it and at that time all the girls in my boarding school was very competitive like boarding school culture of they're like breeding grounds oh my disorders. And it was just, it became, you know, that thing of like who could last the longest without eating. And I'm quite a competitive person. So something I went from being the one that was literally,

I mean, I'd sometimes go to the gym when I had to and I would eat a Mars bar on the cross trainer. Like that's how little connection I had for there to being really, really disciplined. And it accelerated super super fast in space of a couple of months really so by the time I graduated and I left school I was like yeah I shouldn't have been that small I was really not eating enough at all and then luckily I met someone who was my first love I already knew him but he came back into my life and we started dating and he said pretty early on he was like if you don't put on

weight and sort this out like I'm not doing this and there was a bowl of pasta in my hands pretty quickly right and also my mum was just like this is not gonna fly like this isn't I'm not indulging this in this house and my brother and also so it kind of I stepped away from it but it was always present it was always there it just was less visible right and then I guess for the the best of a decade thereafter, it was like slightly yo-yoing. I never felt really like I was consistent in anything to do with my body. It was so unharmonious. 28 29 30 probably more around 30 that I started to really tap into like a different part of my brain or like realize that that's not I didn't want that to control me anymore

yeah and also this restrictive kind of not eating certain things and not going to certain things whatever yeah like that's a huge thing so many people miss out on like social life and connection yeah because they can go to that yeah they can't control what they're eating there but there's just as you're speaking a couple of things came to mind especially around that piece around how girls bodies develop and and I think this is it's just so important for people to know especially parents especially people who are raising girls is that girls bodies go out yeah before they go up and develop in other places that's just we think of growth as this like linear thing, but it's more like a staircase. Yeah. And the other thing was just to like a 10 year period, at least if not longer,

you had all these difficulties with food and your body. And that just because you weren't, you know, collapsing with malnourishment, you know know you were just keeping yourself above the line it feels like that that that wasn't recognized that just that was normal in you know in our society and that is the experience of so many women in particular cis women but increasingly other genders as well. And it's just, you know, these are the people who kind of slip through the cracks of the NHS, right? Like you can't get help from an eating disorder service because you're not sick enough and in inverted commas. But this has had a huge impact on your life and it has a huge impact on so many people that we speak to.

Yet there's nothing really supportive yeah there's no safety net and also because people don't want to admit to those kind of things they're like oh no I don't need to like seek therapy for that or whatever they because they would well I think it's even a step before that it's like there is no awareness that there is even an issue yeah because everybody else is doing it and this is what you talk to your girlfriends about over brunch this is what happens at like Christmas parties and you know it's just so normalized that until somebody points out to you if you're thinking about food and kind of like doing this elaborate equation of what you can and can't eat based on what you've already eaten and how much you've exercised that day that's messed up that's really messed up and we shouldn't be in that headspace to begin with

yeah and the point you just made that I find really key to sort of highlight is that when we go through adolescence and I'm going to speak for women because I can only speak for women. But when our bodies change, I think that can often trigger and set off this distrust between our bodies and ourselves and this disconnection because it's like well my body's turning on me and not only are we developing as women that creates all this confusion but if we're putting on weight in places we didn't expect and stuff like that it's it's it's a lot yeah and and also just i was thinking about the interaction between what's happening in girls and young women's bodies and how society views them and sexualizes them and objectifies them. And just the complete, for want of a better word, clusterfuck of a situation that that creates like it's so confusing it's so disorienting and disconnecting like we've said that yeah how can how can anyone navigate that and come out the other side with an intact relationship with food and their body yeah

well exactly when the messaging is 24 7 and also we are taught to view our bodies as objects, as something to be controlled, to be maintained, to be sort of kept, I suppose, instead of being in relationship with this, with our homes, right? Our bodies are our homes. They're, you know, they're supposed to change over the course of our lives, especially women's bodies change enormously but but we're taught that our bodies should be this static entity rather than this growing living being yeah that ebbs and flows with the seasons of our lives yeah and I'd say a big part of my sort of body sovereignty journey is to love my body and give it what it needs not what society tells me I need to be and I think I like the the phrase that you use body sovereignty and I like the phrase that you use, body sovereignty. And I suppose the important kind of addition, I think, to this conversation is that that's not available to everyone, you know, for a whole host of reasons. Maybe that just feels very, very difficult. Sometimes we talk in clinic about the concept of body neutrality or body respect, just a kind of a low level, giving your body the basics that it needs, hygiene threats to their bodies every single day because of their gender because of their sexual orientation

because of their race because of their religion and so on and so forth and so it was I suppose just to recognize that we're body the limits I suppose of that for folks and and how it might not be available to everyone I just think that that's a kind of important caveat to mention yeah absolutely I think that is really important and also to acknowledge and I always try to that I can only speak from my own personal experience but I am aware that I am you know thin white woman yeah and that for a lot of people they they might listen to this and be like well it's one thing for you to have you know body sovereignty but I don't feel that way about myself yeah yeah I think we need to be so so careful not to project our own priorities and values onto other people because I'm thinking of some of my clients who were born with a chronic illness they will never

achieve health in the same way that you or I without a chronic illness might experience it? Are they less worthy? What if someone was born with a disability or acquires a disability over the course of their life? Again, they're not going to meet society's standards of health or wellness or well-being. And so what I think is so powerful about movements like intuitive eating, like health at every size, like body liberation, is that everyone gets to decide for themselves yeah what works for them what's healthy for them and even then again I think society creates a lot of moral or attributes a lot of moral value to health but health might not be someone's first priority if their priority is getting you know the money together to pay for their child's school uniform right so we're all fighting different battles I think that's a really important thing to say yeah and the other thing that I think is really

important around body positivity is this kind of narrative of like, well, isn't body positivity just glorifying obesity? So again, there's so much to unpack here because if we go way, way, way, way, way back to the very basics, diets don't work. It doesn't matter if you're a size 10 or a size 20 or a size 30, diets don't work. So we have really solid evidence that unless we and i mean scientific evidence that unless we amputate someone's stomach which i'm not down for because it causes all kinds of other issues psychological and physical then there is no guaranteed permanent way to make someone shrink their body unless what we are asking them to do every day is everything that we've just decided is really problematic if you're thin the control the counting calories the obsessing over everything you eat so we have these double standards for people in bigger bodies and

that's fucked up i don't know if i can store on your podcast but i'm doing it because it's really messed up what we there's this great quote from a therapist called Deb Burgard and it kind of goes like what we diagnose in thin people we prescribe to fat people wow the difficulty is when when you're thin you might get some body shaming yes but it tends to be it's more glorified it's more glorified it's a lot more glorified right but if you think about someone trying to move through the world as their body gets bigger they lose privilege they can't get on an airplane sometimes or they have to purchase a second seat they might have to ask for a seat

belt extender and this is not even to talk about medical fat phobia where people um bigger bodies avoid going to medical appointments because they know that their concerns will be trivialized and dismissed and they will just be they will be handed about Trevor's Slimming World and told off you go but how do we know that these people in bigger bodies don't have underlying trauma or eating disorders or other valid medical reasons why their bodies and also just their genetic set point weight. So we all have a genetic set point weight, which is why, you know, you probably fluctuate within a couple of kilograms of your weight and people in a bigger

body will have that same fluctuation. The more that we diet, the higher that set point weight gets. So we actually can diet ourselves up. Also, just a fun fact, a piece of research found that the average weight loss from Slimming World that you get prescribed on the nhs was like five kilograms it's nothing you know like we talked about before health is not a moral obligation for anyone however if if it is a value that you hold and you happen to be in a bmi category that the government determines is obese and i'm using that in air quotes for the listeners, there are so many things, so many things that you can do to improve your health or to care for yourself that do not involve the scales shifting one bit, right? We know that people who, regardless of your body size, if you start

moving your body in a way that feels intuitive, that feels good, that will improve your health. Even if it's just stretching in your chair, we know that that can help improve blood glucose. If you, you know, include more fruits and vegetables and variety in your diet, that's going to improve your health. If you stop smoking, if you stop drinking, like these things all improve your health. And by the way, I don't see someone, you know, getting up in the faces of all the bankers doing coke and being like, but what about your health? You know? Yeah, that's a good point. But we're saying it to fat people who we have no right to comment on what what they do that's really yeah that's a really good comparison yeah because one is more i don't

know i guess one's more visible yeah i also think just because we haven't gone down enough rabbit holes they the concept of emotional eating I think we also have to be very careful with because we can never stop emotional eating a lot of clients come to me and are like I want to stop eating emotionally I want to stop my emotional eating the difficulty is with that is that we're humans we have emotions we can't shut our emotions off to sit down and have a meal but also how how much of our lives would be cutting off if we if we cut off the joy and the pleasure and the you know the social connection and all of these other great things that food can provide and I remember the light bulb moment that went off for me with this bearing in mind

I've been doing this work for a long time but when I started introducing solids to my then six month old and I gave him a piece of banana and he just like started bouncing in his high chair and he was kicking his legs and he was so happy about something so simple I get that I love bananas yeah they're great they're great but he was like bouncing and like this happy grunt and it made me realize like food is emotional and it's it can be joy and don't get me wrong it can be destructive and it can be you know it can be this really difficult thing but what I encourage my clients to do at least is to reframe you know when they're feeling sad and they down a pint of Ben and Jerry's okay there's something not right for you here what's going on this is kind of a symptom and that might be the best thing that you were able

to do in that moment to care for yourself. So that was an act of self-care. What's beneath that? What's that telling you? What can you add to that emotional coping toolkit rather than, you know, taking away the ice cream or whatever it is? What else can we add in there? Is it going to therapy? Is it going for a walk in nature? You know is available to you what's accessible to you that might help you with those difficult situations and if you do eat the entire thing of Ben and Jerry's because that's all that was accessible to you in that moment can you have a bit of self-compassion because that self-compassion of this was really difficult for me and this was how I was able to look after myself that can help break the cycle for the future yeah is there any advice you

have for anyone kind of going through something at the moment and trying to embark on having a bit more autonomy and sovereignty over their body any pieces of advice I think you know we haven't really mentioned that intuitive eating although there's that kind of sense of intuitive eating when we're babies it's our birthright we're born with that ability it gets eroded over time and there is the framework of intuitive eating which is a sort of self-care framework to help guide you back to a place of being able to make decisions about what when and how much to eat based on what feels good for your body and, you know, what's going to bring you pleasure and what's going to satisfy you and what's going to fill you

up. And what's also doesn't feel good in your body and what makes you feel unwell. So the framework of intuitive eating, I think is a really helpful place to start. I talk about it in my book and on my podcast. And there are sort of 10 steps or 10 principles overarching principles that you can work through and I think it just it's never intended to be a rigid formula yeah prescription it's more I like to think of it as sort of experimentation and read around it learn listen to podcasts or audiobooks, kind of play around with it and figure out what works for you. The 10 principles of intuitive eating, the first one is to reject the diet mentality. So this is understanding and recognizing that, first of all,

that having that awareness that we spoke about before, this is even a problem for you that you're doing everything to control what when and how much you eat and that it's actually causing you a lot suffering um learning about the diet cycle so the fact that we you know are able to stick to a diet for like maybe a couple of days maybe a couple of weeks maybe it's longer but that at some point like fuck it i'm just gonna eat everything and anything in sight and then there's all that guilt and shame and self-judgment that follows you so you go back to the beginning of the cycle and round and round like a merry-go-round you go so kind of breaking the diet mentality is about moving away from all of that um the second step is honoring learning to honor your hunger again sounds really simple and straightforward but we are so out of touch with our cues around hunger so in clinic I tend to

do some mindfulness practice around that to help people reconnect and yeah it sounds really simple but it's a lot harder than than it seems but what we know is that if we eat when we're hungry and don't let ourselves get ravenous before we eat then we're much more likely to be able to respect our fullness signals on the other hand um the third and fourth principle are making peace with food and rejecting or challenging the food police and this essentially the making peace with food part is about allowing all those forbidden foods back into our lives sometimes it's just more satisfying to eat you know a real brownie rather than one made with black beans yeah and and you know we might to begin with we might end up eating two or three brownies and that might feel a little bit uncomfortable but eventually we'll find our happy medium so that's the making peace with food part the challenging food police

is is challenging the notion that you can't be healthy and above a certain body size or that certain foods are good or bad or you know if you eat some digestive biscuits with your afternoon cup of tea that you're going to get diabetes like really challenging this extreme nutrition information that is portrayed especially on social media and then um there's feeling your fullness i until you've really built up that trust and and develop some of these other skills your ability to honor your fullness isn't gonna click so there's the fullness piece there's understanding emotional eating which we've kind of unpacked and talked about there's the mindfulness piece and the the i call it the pleasure principle so again making sure we're getting enough pleasure from food because that's

another reason that people feel like they can't stop when they're full they're like because they're full not satisfied yeah and there's a huge distinction between those two things so you can you can fill yourself up with water I don't recommend it it's not going to be satisfying right so there's that distinction that we have to make the last two principles are intuitive movement and then there's the body respect piece and also gentle nutrition so this is how can we bring in nutrition in a way that is not all or nothing that's not all that's not rigid yeah it's not rigid so what we would think about doing is okay i want to have my biscuits with my cup of tea could I have a piece of cheese or some nuts or something to go alongside that that will help steady out my blood sugar levels so it's a much more it's a gentler gentler approach it's more about what you can add

in rather than take away from your diet that's key yeah and how you can balance things in a way that doesn't feel like you're missing out and I talk about the sort of two-way street of trust with your body so there's us learning to trust our body's signals and our you know ability to to stop when we're full but there's also our body needs to learn to trust us and if we have been starving it if we have been restricting it if we have not been honoring it it's going to take a little bit of time for our body to learn to trust us again and so it might kind of like push us a little bit and be like no we're going to eat all these cookies because I don't believe you that we'll be able to eat them tomorrow well thank you

so much this has been a very enlightening conversation. Thank you for having me and letting me get up on my soapbox about stuff that I feel passionate about. Well, it comes across and you know a lot and it's very, very educational. So thank you very much. During our Saturn Returns journey, we are often invited to look at certain patterns of behavior that are no longer serving us.

This was definitely a big one for me in addressing my relationship with my body. Of all the information there is out there about food, nutrition, dieting, the only thing that's really stuck out for me as something that feels healthy and individual and personal and unique is intuitive eating because intuition has been such a big part of this journey. It's something that I encourage all of you to tap into more. Not practicing self-love is something that's incredibly normalized in our society. Chastising and practicing self-hate is almost more normalized. And that's something that I hope you take away from this conversation. If you start with anything, I would encourage you to start with this. If you feel emotional

after this episode, to really sit with that and allow that to come up, and then just say in your head that you're going to start making a change. One thing that I do when I'm feeling low, or I'm struggling with something, or I'm feeling those thoughts come in, is I go over my entire body with my hands, from my toes to my neck, to my head, my back, every part of it, and I feed it love. I feed it love again and again and again. And I feed it love in moments when it feels like it doesn't deserve it. Those are the most important times to do it. Again, this is a very personal thing for me to share. But over time, I feel that that began to seep in. And I have a lot more harmony with my body and my relationship with food now it's not perfect but I'm in a much happier place

so if you would like to find out more about Laura and her work you can find her on Instagram at laurathomasphd or her website laurathomasphd.co.uk and you can find her books Just Eat It or How to Just Eat It from any good retailer. You can follow our astrological guide Nora on Instagram at starsincline and you can follow me at kaggy's world. If you like listening to this episode I would love it if you could follow the show and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or just share it with a friend who you think might find it useful. Saturn Returns is a Feast Collective production. The producer is Hannah Varel and the executive producer is Kate Taylor. Thank you so much for listening.

And remember, you are not alone. Goodbye.