Dr. Kerri Fullerton ND

Intuitive Eating. Health At Every Size (HAES) Doctor

What Is Intuitive Eating?

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So, you’ve heard the buzz about Intuitive Eating, and you’re probably thinking, “What is intuitive eating?” 

In a world where diet culture reigns supreme, Intuitive Eating emerges as a beacon of hope, offering a way of nourishing the body while cultivating a healthy relationship with food. But what exactly is Intuitive Eating, and how does it differ from mainstream nutrition advice? Let’s explore the core principles and benefits of this peaceful approach to food. 

The authors of Intuitive Eating say that “Intuitive eating is a personal process of honoring health by listening and responding to the direct messages of the body in order to get your needs met.” p 4 

Sounds simple enough, right? Just listen to your body and give it what it wants.  

If only it were that easy. 

Let’s explore why this concept is anything but easy. 

The Art of Interoceptive Awareness: Tuning Into Your Tummy 

At the heart of Intuitive Eating lies the concept of interoceptive awareness. Fancy term, right? Basically, it’s the skill of recognizing and responding to your body’s signals. It’s like your body has a secret language, and Intuitive Eating is your guidebook to deciphering it. 

This step is priority one when I’m working with people. My own experience might mirror yours here. I started by ‘just’ eating whatever I wanted whenever I wanted it. Long story short: a bag of cookies for dinner doesn’t build food trust, nor was I eating intuitively. 

Interoceptive awareness is a two-fold process, encompassing awareness and responsiveness. Knowing you’re hungry is not the same as feeding yourself.  

Let’s break that down. 

Step 1: Learn what being hungry and full feels like.  

You’ve had so much interference in this area. You’ve been conditioned to distrust your body and its cues.

This conditioning started in childhood when your caregiver told you to clean your plate to earn dessert. It was reinforced at school with the good and bad food lists in health class. By high school, you were probably dieting like everyone else – although you might have called it “just eating healthy.” Every plan came with another set of rules about what and when to eat and not eat, how much to eat, and how much water to drink.  

Slowly but surely, the locust of control was moved out of your body and into the hands of some external controller. All of this is hindering the intuitive eating process. 

Step 2: Respond to Your Body Cues 

Tell me, how many times have you said, “I’ll grab something as soon as I finish this one thing,” and then find that hours have passed and you still haven’t eaten? 

The magic of intuitive eating happens when you respond to your body cues in a timely manner in a way that aligns with your body’s needs.  

Again, you may notice this seems so simple. And yet you know from experience it’s anything but.  

Body Appreciation: The Key to Responsiveness 

Turns out, appreciating our bodies is the key to unlocking the bridge between hearing our body’s cues and responding to those cues. But here’s the kicker – there’s this whole cultural mess with fashion, fitness, wellness culture.  

They’ve been telling you since childhood, either explicitly through the ‘war on obesity’ messaging or implicitly through the lack of body diversity in media, that your body is wrong and needs to be fixed.

Every before and after photo, every ‘Are you actually going to eat that?’ remark, and every ‘OMG, you’ve lost weight! Tell me your secret’ comment erodes your body appreciation.  

The good news is that just as we’ve learned to disparage our bodies, we can learn to appreciate them.  

Diet and Wellness Culture is the common denominator 

There is so much noise about what healthy and fit look like alongside the conflicting nutritional messages that we can’t hear ourselves well enough to simply ‘eat what we want when we want it without guilt’.  

It’s like you’re in a quiet library, trying to concentrate on reading or studying (internal processes). Suddenly, a loud concert (external measurements) starts right outside the library. The noise disrupts your focus and makes it challenging to engage with your internal thoughts and tasks. Similarly, external measurements or distractions can interfere with your internal processes, making it harder to concentrate and work effectively. 

That’s why Principle One of Intuitive Eating is Reject the Diet Mentality. As long as we remain focused on external measurements and expectations, hearing and honouring our personal body cues will continue to be difficult. Quieting the noise is the foundation of developing your interoceptive awareness.  

You can start with my free guide: 12 Food Rules to Unlearn.

What Unconditional Permission to Eat Really Means 

I’ve heard it a thousand times, and you’ve probably thought it. “Without any food rules, I’d just eat junk all day.” 

This misconception that unconditional permission to eat will lead to an unhealthy, imbalanced diet has been proven false. Studies show that Intuitive Eaters have a wider variety of food intake and an increased consumption of fruits and vegetables. 

While intuitive eating IS about eating what you want, free from guilt and shame, it’s NOT about acting on every urge or craving. 

I will reiterate a previous statement here: developing interoceptive awareness is priority one when I’m working with people. It’s hard to give yourself unconditional permission when it’s too noisy to hear yourself.  

The Nutrition Fallacy: 

Contrary to popular belief, Intuitive Eating does consider nutrition. It focuses on eating in a way that feels good, energizes you, and doesn’t involve a calculator. 

By moving away from external variables like rules and restrictions, individuals can cultivate internal awareness and make balanced food choices. 

I’d Never Stop Eating: 

The fear of never stopping eating is a common concern. However, when you consistently feed yourself nourishing meals, that primal urge to eat subsides. 

If you hold your breath, what happens? You’ll take big gulps of air, and your respiration rate will go up until you can breathe normally again. The same is true with food. Your body realizes it can finally relax at the dinner table because it knows you won’t deprive it tomorrow.   

TL;DR 

In conclusion, Intuitive Eating offers a refreshing departure from the confines of diet culture, promoting a sustainable and mindful approach to nourishment. By understanding its principles and dispelling myths, individuals can embark on a transformative journey toward healing their relationship with food and body. Remember, Intuitive Eating is a personal process, and there’s no “one size fits all” on this path to well-being. 

Working with a certified Intuitive Eating Counselor can make a world of difference. You can find one near you here. I’m in that directory, and I’d be happy to chat about how intuitive eating could help you.

Until next time, Kerri

Ready to start quieting the noise? Download my free guide: 12 Food Rules to Unlearn

What Happens After A Diabetes Diagnosis?

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After her diabetes diagnosis, my patient’s MD gave her a one-page dietary handout and a prescription and sent her on her way. She had so many questions but nobody to answer them for her.  

She told me about standing in the kitchen the next morning feeling paralyzed while making breakfast. Food was suddenly terrifying – she felt like she was one bite away from cardiac arrest. 

confused after diabetes diagnosis

Like most of my patients diagnosed with diabetes or insulin resistance, she felt like she was to blame, that she had brought this upon herself. The shame was amplified by the fact that she lives in a larger body. Even though she had spent most of her life on one diet or another, none of them ever stuck. 

Maybe you can relate.  

There are three things that she needed to know before anyone gave her a diet to follow. I’ll bet you need them, too. 

  1. It’s not your fault. That’s not to say that lifestyle choices don’t impact it; they just didn’t cause it.  
  1. You can’t hate yourself healthy. 
  1. Eliminating the foods you love isn’t necessary to address your new diagnosis. 

Let’s expand on each of these.

You Did Not Cause Your Diabetes Diagnosis

I know that you have read, likely ad nauseam, about how weight, diet and exercise are associated with almost every medical condition out there. I’m not here to dispute that.  

What I really want you to understand is that there is a key distinction between our lifestyle causing insulin resistance and diabetes vs our lifestyle influencing the development of insulin resistance and diabetes.  

While we know about many different associations, we don’t know what causes diabetes, PCOS or fatty liver disease (NAFLD). 

Did you know that the genetic link to Type 2 Diabetes (T2DM) is stronger than that for Type 1 Diabetes? This is important to know because there’s a dangerous narrative out there that getting or preventing a diabetes diagnosis is entirely within our control. It’s not.  

If you have a genetic predisposition or family history of insulin resistance, then your stress, sleep, nutrition and activity level will have a greater impact on the development of diabetes than someone without the genetic predisposition or family history.  

Interestingly, weight-cyclingi or yo-yo dieting, is also a risk factor for developing diabetes. Yep. All those years of trying to keep your weight down to prevent diabetes may have contributed to the diagnosis you now face. 

Other factors includingii:  

  • Alcohol intake 
  • Smoking 
  • Level of activity 
  • Stress 
  • Insomnia 
  • Medications 
  • Micronutrient deficiencies 
  • Socio-economic status 
  • Environment  

have all been implicated in the development of T2DM.  

Bottom line: while your lifestyle can definitely play a part in developing and managing insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes, it wasn’t the underlying cause of it. 

Treatment, therefore, must address so much more than just how you eat and move your body.  

You Can’t Hate Yourself Healthy

Most of my patients come to me believing that they caused their condition. They also come to me with a loud and persistent inner critic. 

But here’s the thing: even if you did cause your diagnosis (which you didn’t – see #1 above), beating yourself up about it isn’t going to change the reality that you have this condition. 

When I talk about self-compassion, I typically get one of two responses: 

  1. Yeah, I know, Kerri, I’m so hard on myself, but I just can’t help it. 
  1. If I’m not hard on myself, nothing will change. I’ll never eat right or move more. It’s tough love. 

Fun fact: We know that people who practice self-compassion have better glycemic controliii. Possibly because mindful self-compassion is a key strategy to restoring your relationship with your body and food, which leads to improved nutrition and a more consistent exercise pattern.  

Change is hard, and you won’t do it perfectly. When things don’t go as planned, when you eat in a way that doesn’t help your sugar, or when you miss an exercise opportunity, instead of the barrage of criticism coming from within, you meet yourself with compassion and understanding.  

So no, being kinder to yourself isn’t the same as ‘letting yourself go.’ In fact, it’s a key step in managing your sugars and following a plan long-term. 

Cutting Out Your Favourite Foods Isn’t Necessary to Manage Your Sugars.

Diets don’t work. You know that. You’ve probably tried them all. 

But then life happened, and you couldn’t keep following it. Maybe you got sick or hungry. You went on a holiday or decided to enjoy that celebration dinner. 

The only way for a dietary intervention to have a positive influence on your health is for you to be able to implement that intervention most of the time for a long time. 

The same is true for exercise.  

A boot camp or cleanse isn’t going to change anything in the long run. 

This is why learning to listen to your body instead of the influencers and gurus is so important. They don’t know you, your likes and dislikes, or your obligations.  

You need to learn how to eat healthfully, not make your life about healthy eating. 

Intuitive eating is the way to do this. 

You’ll have heard that intuitive eating isn’t for diabetics. I mean, you can’t just eat whatever you want, can you? 

That’s partly true. If you believe that intuitive eating is about following every impulse you have around food then yes, that would not be good for your blood sugar management.  

But intuitive eating isn’t about just saying eff it to the food rules. It’s about learning to listen to what your body needs and then honouring that, most of the time.  

This isn’t easy in our current culture full of body loathing and food fear. You only have to go to the grocery store to see headlines about a new superfood that’ll cure you or a food that’s going to kill you.  

It takes time and patience, but I promise you, it’s worth it.  

In summary, before you embark on a diet overhaul or sign yourself up for a boot camp, take a step back.  

  • This is not your fault. Many things have to come together for a diabetes diagnosis to happen.  
  • Self-compassion is a skill that is learned, just like you learned how to be your own worst critic. It is a key strategy for making lifestyle changes stick. 
  • Restriction leads to intrusive food thoughts and overeating. Intuitive eating is an approach that allows you to prioritize your health goals without compromising your enjoyment of food or social gatherings. 

We live in a world that tells us that food is both the cause and cure of all that ails us. It’s no wonder we have such a complicated relationship with food and our bodies.  

The only solution that’s ever on offer is a list of foods to avoid alongside a list of superfoods and supplements to take.  

We’re either “on plan” or “off the wagon.” 

You don’t need another meal plan. You need to restore a healthy relationship with food and your body.  When you stop fighting with your body and seeing it as a DIY project and choose instead to work together and find a way of eating and moving that’s satisfying and sustainable, you find freedom. 

I’m here to help you along the way.  

You can start by downloading my free guide, 12 Food Rules To Unlearn. Or, if you’d like to chat, book a complimentary time with me to see how intuitive eating can help you.

Until next time, 

Dr. Kerri 

Do I Trick or Do I Treat?

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Halloween can be a tricky dilemma for families, especially now when sugar and carbs are vilified by diet and wellness culture. Some believe we’re teaching our children to binge eat and that Halloween is unhealthy. At the same time, others believe that it is a childhood rite of passage.

Can you create healthy eating patterns for your children and participate in Halloween? I’ve heard of a few different strategies.

• Let your kids go collecting and limit how much they eat each day.
• Not restrict. Just let them have at it.
• Let them experience collecting candy but not let them eat it. Allow them to trade it for toys or cash.
• Not let them go. Take them to a movie instead.

My experience with Halloween was troubling as a child. I loved it! Up until we had to hand over our candy, and it was doled out in rations. It was stressful picking the one or two pieces I was allowed each day.

The best way to add value to anything is to restrict it. This is true in all areas of life. If everyone and anyone can get something, it’s not valued. If it’s rare, it’s revered, and its value increases. We want what we can’t have. And we know now from research that food restriction leads to disordered eating and secret eating. That is precisely what happened to me.

We are teaching our kids that candy is so special and rare. For some kids like me, this turns into a habit of secret eating and food hoarding. These children feel ashamed because they know they “shouldn’t,” but they can’t help themselves. They will ‘steal’ food and scarf it back as fast as they can before anyone catches them. This often leads to intrusive and obsessive food thoughts.

Perhaps it would be easier if you did not allow your kids to go trick-or-treating. Could that be a solution? Then there would be no candy to worry about. Unfortunately, being left out is hard on a kid’s self-esteem. Halloween is discussed on TV shows, at school, and with friends. It’s a big conversation – What will you go out dressed up as? What candy did you get? So as a parent, this wasn’t a solution for our household.

We’ve allowed my son to go out and get his loot. Of course, we go through it to ensure it’s safe to eat. Then when he is going to eat his candy, he eats with attention paid to the candy itself. At first, he wasn’t allowed to eat the candy mindlessly while watching TV or playing video games. He could eat at the table or sit on the floor with his candy spread out. Now, we don’t enforce the mindful bit as much. He’s learned to eat until he’s done.

What’s happened in my house using this approach is that candy is never gone. Every year there is always leftover candy getting tossed out the following September. Only the candy that is tasty and satisfying gets eaten. Over the years, there has only been one big tummy ache from overeating candy. That stomach-ache wasn’t enjoyable, so he hasn’t done it again.

If this is too scary, consider putting some candy out at a few different snacks and mealtimes throughout the weeks. Put it out with the rest of the foods that you’re serving. Let them decide what order they will eat their food in. If they know it’s regularly coming and can eat it without judgement, it’s much easier for them to listen to their bodies.

Remember, they’re going to be exposed to sugar in life. I see our job as parents to help them feel confident and competent in managing whatever food is in front of them. Trust is built through experience, so I believe that they need to experience a lot of different foods in different ways to see what feels good for them.

How do YOU Measure Success?

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Measuring success is deeply engrained in both business and personal development. Sadly, we are often encouraged to measure something that is actually irrelevant to our real goals.

For instance, measuring the number of followers that I have doesn’t reflect how I’m doing financially. Just like measuring my weight or inches doesn’t actually reflect my health or my worth.

When my patients choose to work with me they are often perplexed on how to measure their progress. “How will I know if it’s working?” is a common question.

Since September is the unofficial new year and therefore wrought with weight-loss ads promoting themselves as get healthy schemes, I figure that now’s a good time to review some non-scale related measurements of success.

It’s important for me to take a moment here and speak to context. Any of these can become a substitute for the scale if we give it veto over how we’re allowed to feel about ourselves. For instance, if I use the fact that I ate outside of biological hunger cues as evidence that I’m failing, then that’s really no different than using the scale.

Measurements are data. And data doesn’t have a moral value. It’s not good or bad, it just is. If you’re not yet at a place where you can’t separate data and morality, then measurements are not likely a healthy part of your progress at the moment.

All of that to say, stay curious. Start your sentences and ponderances with ‘isn’t it interesting…’.

Here are some of the measurements that my patients have come up with over the years:

  • How peaceful are they with food and body
  • How often did they honour their hunger/fullness cues
  • How far past comfortable fullness did they go? Did they let themselves get as hungry as they use to?
  • How much time are they spending thinking about food or their body
  • How many times did they say no to issue or guard a boundary
  • How quickly did they pivot out of food police voices and into IE voices
  • How many did they choose calm over chaos
  • How many times did they check in with their body for direction? (Even if they weren’t able to fulfill the request)
  • How long did they feel the feels before using a coping strategy
  • How is their energy
  • What about strength or endurance? Have they changed?

In the September MLR we are going to walk through all of this in greater detail. If you’re looking to make some diet free goals, then here’s your group support.

Join the MLR today!

Creating Weight Neutral Goals

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As September rolls around again, we enter the next weight loss season. It’s the unofficial New Year and it’s just as full as ‘time to get healthy’ schemes as January is.

Let’s get one thing clear. Health is not weight loss. Losing weight isn’t the same thing as improving your health. Neither health nor weight loss are behaviours.

If health is important to you (and it’s not a moral obligation for it to be) – but pursuing weight loss hasn’t produced long-term results – then maybe it’s time to take a different approach?

Welcome to Weight Neutral Healthcare. It’s the kind of health care that bodies of all sizes can participate in. The focus is on health and healthy behaviours vs weight and weight loss.

Let’s say that you’d like to become more active this fall. That behaviour is linked to improved blood sugar regulation, lower blood pressure, and improved cardiovascular function. Awesome!

In order for you to receive those health benefits*, being more active is something that has to last. It needs to be part of your life in a sustainable way. And it DOES NOT need to lead to weight loss in order for those health benefits to be bestowed upon you.

(*The exception may be blood sugar control as this side effect of movement can have an immediate effect that can last upwards of 24 hours.)

So Jillian Micheals style bootcamps that kick your ass and cause you pain, may not be the way to go.

Measuring your weight or inches for signs of success aren’t going to keep you moving for long. Measuring something that’s entirely outside of your control isn’t setting yourself up for success.

“Enough on the ‘what not to do’ Kerri. What do I do instead?”

I’m so glad that you asked! 🥰

1. Get clear on what really matters to you.
I’ll tell you a little secret. I don’t exercise because it’s good for me. I don’t care enough on the hard days for that to get me moving. I move because I love being outside. Bonus points if it’s social. It’s good for my mood and my energy. It influences how I show up in my life. That matters to me.

2. Create goals that are within your control.
‘Lose xyz pounds by Thanksgiving’ is a crappy goal because it’s not within your control. ‘Move my body everyday’ is a better goal because it is within your control.

3. Set yourself up to win.
Lower the bar. Instead of ‘do yoga for 45 minutes everyday’ try ‘do yoga everyday’. That way you can do any amount of yoga from one deep breath in mountain pose to 100 sun salutations and everything in between.

Consistency trumps intensity where most things are concerned. Showing up to a healthy behaviour regularly will have a lasting effect on your health. Health kicks and bootcamps won’t.

If you’re looking for some support this fall, check out my program Mastering Life As a Rebel. Each of these steps has its own video and worksheet.

My size doesn’t limit my participation

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I love being on the water. I love being near water. It just soothes me in a way that nothing else can.

But being in the water typically means wearing a bathing suit. And for most of my life that was hard. Having other people see my body, my fear of their judgement about my body – it was distracting from the activity that I was participating in.

Let me call out my privilege right now. I’ve never been in a really big body. The body that I have now is the biggest one I’ve had. I didn’t have to worry about finding a kayak that would support my weight or accommodate my size. That is a privilege.

But I didn’t understand the concept of privilege back then, and honestly, I don’t think that knowing it would’ve changed how hard it was to be seen. Because my body image challenges have never been about my body.

Let me say that again: my body image issues weren’t about my body.

My lack of body confidence came from growing up around women that were always at war with their own bodies. Always on a diet or about to start a diet after falling off the wagon. They spoke harshly about their own bodies and those of others.

My fear of judgement was part of undiagnosed anxiety.

My body dissatisfaction was from girls calling other girls (that were my size or smaller) fat. And hearing things like “if I ever get like that just shoot me”.

I believed with all of my being that I was too big and that if I could just have the body that I wanted then….then I’d be happy and confident.

Being able to enjoy being on the water without all of that chatter is one of the best results of my #foodfreedom #bodyacceptance journey.

🏝 traveling to Hawaii and actually being there (vs in my head)
🌺 paddle boarding with my friends in San Diego without comparing myself
☀️ saying yes to an impromptu kayak adventure with friends

I really didn’t realize how much life I was missing because of my focus on how I looked. By either opting out because of a bad-body-image-day or missing out while I was there because of the chatter in my head.

My size doesn’t limit my participation in life unless I let it. This is where understanding my privilege has helped so much because that statement isn’t actually true for a lot of people. A lot of people can’t participate because our world isn’t set up for large and very large bodies.

While I do my part to create a world of inclusion, I will no longer miss out on the opportunities life has on offer.

What would you do if you weren’t thinking about how you looked? Or worried about what other people thought about how you looked?

Let’s find out!