Embracing Food Neutrality and Quieting Food Noise

Ever feel like the chatter about what you should or shouldn’t eat is never-ending? That’s food noise. Adopting a position of food neutrality will help to quiet that noise. Intuitive eaters relate to foods neutrally, instead of labeling good vs bad, healthy vs unhealthy, etc. Over time, as you improve this skill, you will quiet the food noise and turn it into something you might only occasionally notice in the background of your thoughts. Here are some tips on how to start that process and why it’s so important in making peace with food.

Section 1: Understanding Food Neutrality

What does it mean to view food neutrally? It means breaking the dichotomy of how diet culture has taught us to label food. Consider how often you hear food labeled: healthy, unhealthy, clean, good, bad, junk, red light, green light, etc. Instead of our brain categorizing foods into these moral camps, food neutrality builds a perspective toward all foods that is neutral and non-judgemental. 

Food neutrality is essential in fostering a healthy relationship with food. It reduces guilt and anxiety around eating. It prevents self-loathing and shameful feelings about what you eat. And it sets you up for long-term balanced eating habits built on your genuine preferences, gentle nutrition, and your mental, emotional and social health. 

Section 2: What Is Food Noise?

Food noise is the constant chatter- both from external and internal sources- about foods and health. It could be what to eat, what not to eat, what to cook for dinner, what to order at the restaurant, what groceries to buy, what food is healthy, what diet should you do, what diet is your friend doing, what new food trend is going around, what did you eat yesterday that you felt guilty about…. It never ends. Individuals wrestle with varying amounts of food noise in their head and in their environment, but those that have a history of chronic dieting or are currently experiencing disordered eating or eating disorders are likely dealing with a LOT of food noise all day, every day.

Think about all the places we encounter messages about food: social media, magazines, books, podcasts, news, friends, family members, doctors offices, restaurants, grocery stores PLUS anything you heard in the past that still rattles around in your brain.

The internal noise like personal food rules and restrictive thinking can be some of the hardest to quiet. You can change who you follow on social media, you can change which cookbooks you use, you can change which magazines you bring home, but it’s much more logistically difficult to flat out change your thoughts. 

It takes practice, it takes repetition, and it takes a compassionate approach. 

Impact of Food Noise:

Food noise disrupts your natural hunger cues and emotional well-being. It prevents you from being able to identify your own preferences, likes and dislikes. It feeds you constant information (true or untrue) about food and nutrition that doesn’t actually improve your health. It causes you emotional and mental stress to weigh all this information at all times. 

We don’t actually have to think that hard about what to eat. We can have a gentler, calmer and more *neutral* relationship with our food choices and still promote good health- physically, emotionally, mentally and socially.

How Intuitive Eating Counters Food Noise

Intuitive eating teaches honoring hunger, respecting fullness, and making peace with food. It teaches you to listen to your cravings, your food preferences, your stomach, and to consider what foods will bring not just fullness but also satisfaction. 

It teaches you to tune into your body, while tuning out the unhelpful food noise. Often, we don’t need to listen to our thoughts to use our internal cues; we need to listen to our body. 

The intuitive eating principles of rejecting diet mentality and having unconditional permission to eat are integrally connected to the concepts of food neutrality and quieting the food noise. Rejecting the diet mentality is another way of saying rejecting the food noise in your brain and in the culture. It requires food neutrality; if no foods are good/bad/healthy/unhealthy, then there’s no diet or rules to follow. If there are no “bad” foods, then there's no reason to limit or restrict your food options.

The Role of a Dietitian in Supporting Food Neutrality

Working with an intuitive eating dietitian can help you develop and maintain food neutrality. They can help you identify thought patterns that keep you stuck. They support you in unlearning food labels while still providing you with trustworthy, evidence-based gentle nutrition information. They help you talk through your fears about adopting food neutrality and answer common questions, like “Will I lose control and start binge eating if I treat all foods as equal?”

A dietitian will help you focus on nourishment, satisfaction, and well-being to transform your relationship with food. They will remind you of the truth: that no food is inherently good or bad, and help keep you on track when the food noise tries to creep back in.

Practical Tips for Embracing Food Neutrality

• Recognize Food Labels: Start identifying food labels and then reframing them. You may see physical labels on foods in the store, or you may notice when labels pop into your brain when a food is mentioned. The first step toward food neutrality is noticing when the dichotomous labeling happens.

• Challenge Food Rules: Acknowledge and question restrictive beliefs or rules around certain foods. Now that you are taking note of how you label foods (and how food companies label them), you can begin to develop awareness around the internal rules and restrictions you set around certain foods. If you feel ready, you can begin to challenge those rules by breaking them and noticing- with curiosity and compassion- what happens. Never let yourself have a donut in the office break room? Try it out one morning and see what happens. Notice your thoughts. Notice how your body feels. Discuss the experience with your dietitian, if you’re working with one.

• Mindful Eating: Practice mindful eating to stay present and connected with your body’s needs. Check in with your hunger and fullness levels before, once during, and after your meal. Limit distractions while you eat and think about the sensations and experience of eating. Instead of nutrition metrics (calories, fat, carbohydrates, etc) think about the taste, the smell, who you’re sharing the meal with or where the origin of the recipe came from. 

• Silencing External Noise: Remember we talked about it being difficult to change your own thoughts about food overnight? It can take some time to begin naturally and unconsciously embracing food neutrality. So one of the best things you can do for yourself right away is to limit exposure to harmful external food messages. Unfollow accounts that label foods good or bad and promote diets. Reduce media consumption like books, podcasts and magazines that have diet-heavy messages. If you have cookbooks or follow food blogs that are heavily into “healthy,” “clean” or “whole-30/paleo/keto/” recipes, consider putting those away for a while. 

As you silence external food noise and work consistently on practicing food neutrality, one day it will become your new normal and you won’t have to consciously reframe your diet-thoughts anymore, they’ll be neutral from the beginning. 

Embrace the journey towards food neutrality as an ongoing process. Just like learning intuitive eating, it’s not going to be linear. See every day as a learning experience and lean hard into grace, self-compassion, curiosity and kindness. 

Trust your body’s wisdom and seek support from professionals like dietitians who advocate for food freedom and intuitive eating. I would love to work with you. If you’re not ready for one-on-one support, I also have a brand new body cues workbook coming out Fall 2024. Make sure you are signed up for email newsletters so you will be the first to know when it’s available. As a bonus for subscribing, you’ll get my Hello Intuitive Eating Workbook sent right to your inbox.

Before and After Intuitive Eating

Everyone loves a good before/after comparison. It’s part of how diet culture grabs us; they shock us with amazing “results” and make you think: I want that! Intuitive eating also has amazing results, they just might not be what you are conditioned to look for from healthy habits. Let’s dive into the before and after of an intuitive eater.

What intuitive eating IS

Intuitive Eating (IE) is getting back to your inner intuition and knowledge when it comes to food, eating, and connecting to your body. It is an approach to food and health built around ten principles. These principles include honoring your hunger, having unconditional permission to eat any and all foods, eating satisfying foods, listening to cravings, and more. There is a lot more to cover in a full explanation of intuitive eating, but you can read my blog post about it and check out the OG book from your local library, or buy a copy here.

What intuitive eating is NOT

Intuitive eating is not a diet or a weight loss plan. It is not a weight management practice, either. It should *never* be promoted using before and after photos of someone having lost weight. If you see an account or business promoting intuitive eating alongside weight loss or weight management, run in the other direction. They may be genuinely trying to practice intuitive eating, but it will never be helpful for you to learn about intuitive eating from someone who is celebrating weight loss and touting it as a promised outcome of IE. 

Physical health before and after

How might your physical health change with intuitive eating? Obviously, those of us healthcare providers that promote intuitive eating believe that it has the potential to make you physically healthier, so let’s talk about it. 

Mental health before and after

If you’re just getting started on your intuitive eating journey (or heck, maybe you’re here because you’re just curious to learn what it is) I am so excited for you to experience what’s to come. The mental health benefits from giving up chronic dieting, working on body acceptance, and embracing intuitive eating are *chef’s kiss.* 

Social health before and after

Intuitive eating will not only impact your mental and physical health, but your social health, too. Over time, you may begin to realize how much dieting was truly affecting almost every aspect of your life, from friendships to work to hobbies and more. 

Belonging before and after

One of the changes in your life that you should be prepared for is the loss that comes with no longer being able to bond or connect with others over dieting, body critiquing or food shame stories. The good news is that there is a beautiful, diverse community of fat-positive, anti-diet, intuitive eaters ready to welcome you with open arms. 

It’s ok to grieve the loss of that connection point. It’s a shame that our culture has made connecting over body shaming, diet talk and weight loss advice so common and expected. But one thing you can do to prepare is to come up with some go-to phrases that you’ll use when these types of conversations come up. Here’s a few options:

• I’m working on accepting my body, do you mind if we don’t talk about weight loss?

• I’ve recently quit dieting and have been learning about intuitive eating. If you’re interested I can send you some of my favorite IG follows. Is it OK if we don’t talk about diets right now? 

• I’m recovering from disordered eating. Can we change the topic?

A few other before and after pics:

Do you notice a trend here? It’s not the food that has to change. It’s not the exercise that has to change. It’s not the weight that has to change. It’s how you feel about the thing that changes. 

You can eat a hamburger on a diet and you can eat one while practicing intuitive eating. 

Dieting, you may feel guilty. You may compensate the next day by having only salad. You may go for an extra run to make up for it. You may have stressed all day long about what you were going to order that day. You may have spent the whole dinner conversation talking about how bad you were for eating that hamburger and fries.

Eating a hamburger as an intuitive eater means you just… eat the hamburger. You process any feelings that come up with compassion and curiosity, but no judgment. You move on! It was never the hamburger that was the problem, it was the diet approach. It was the focus on weight loss. It was the morality associated with food. 

As you embrace intuitive eating, you will hopefully notice that a lot of things change, and I would expect most of them to be positive! Your body *may* change. It may gain weight, it may lose weight, or its weight may not change. You may have some feelings associated with that that you can process with a therapist or dietitian. 

If you come to intuitive eating desperate for a new diet to try, you’ll be disappointed. Come ready to try a completely new approach to health, food, body acceptance and diversity of bodies.  Got more questions? I’d love to chat with you.

How to Get Hunger Cues Back: A Guide to Getting In-tune With Your Body's Natural Signals

Anyone who has ever dieted knows the dilemma of feeling hungry but thinking you aren’t *supposed* to eat. In those moments, you might choose to eat anyway, or you might decide to restrict your food intake and eat nothing. You can see how over time, chronic dieting disconnects you from your body’s hunger cues. Imagine your body saying to you, “Well, you never seem to listen to me when I tell you I’m hungry, so I’m done communicating!” 

If you’re healing from disordered eating or trying to lean into intuitive eating, a vital part of the process is regaining your natural hunger signals. Ideally, you will restore your relationship with your body and with food so that one day eating will be a natural, normal and easy action that doesn’t require a ton of thinking. For this to be the case, we want your body’s internal cues, like hunger, fullness, cravings, likes/dislikes and satisfaction to inform your food choices, instead of external cues, like diets or food rules, calling the shots.

In this post we dive into what hunger cues are and some steps you can take to restore your body’s natural cues. 

Understanding Hunger Cues

Let’s go over a basic definition. Hunger cues are physical and emotional signals that indicate the need for food. They vary in intensity based on how long it’s been since you ate, what kinds of foods you ate, what kind of activity you’ve been doing, your level of distraction or busyness, and more. 

Some examples of hunger cues include: stomach rumbling, inability to concentrate, crankiness, nausea, lightheadedness, feeling weak, or shaky hands. As you get more in-tune with your body and engage in regular body check-ins, you will be able to detect the more subtle, early hunger cues, instead of waiting until the later, more intense cues hit. 

Why Do Hunger Cues Disappear?

There are many things that can cause hunger cues to fade, either for a short time (acutely) or chronically. Let’s review some of the causes:

• Long term dieting, regular food restriction or eating disorders decrease the activity of your body’s hunger messengers, and eventually slow down your metabolism, too. Think of your body being in survival mode. If it learns that you aren’t providing it with adequate nourishment (energy), it attempts to conserve as much energy as possible, and can slow down many of your body’s internal messaging systems, including hunger. 

• Stress, depression or anxiety can quiet or completely eliminate your body’s hunger cues.

• Acute sickness (like having the flu) or taking certain medications can impact hunger signals, either increasing or decreasing them. 

• Life stages and conditions like aging, pregnancy or puberty can also impact hunger cues. 

The bottom line is this: ignoring hunger cues can lead to disconnection from your body’s needs. If you want to be an intuitive eater, it is imperative you reconnect with your body. Sometimes (like when you’re sick) hunger cues might fade, and you may need to eat without relying on hunger cues to tell you when it’s time. But most of the time, we want hunger cues to be a central part of how you know when and how much food to eat to adequately nourish your body.

The Role of Intuitive Eating

You’ve heard me mention intuitive eating a few times now. If you’re not sure what that is, check out this post “What is Intuitive Eating” for a bit of background. 

Very simply, intuitive eating is using the body’s intuition in harmony with the head’s knowledge when it comes to food, eating and connecting to your body. Babies are a great example of intuitive eating: they let you know they’re hungry by crying (or exhibiting some other signals) and once satisfied they’ll generally stop eating on their own. As we grow up and are exposed to all kinds of influence and ideas about food and eating, we can get disconnected from that intuition. Intuitive eating is a return to eating based on our body’s cues.

Intuitive eating relies heavily on you reconnecting with your body. As you practice it over time, it should reduce food-related anxiety and guilt, help you meet your nutritional and energy needs and support long-term health and well-being (including mental and emotional health!

Steps to Regain Hunger Cues

If you’re thinking that this all sounds great, but wondering how in the world you go about reconnecting with your body, let’s cover some actionable tips you can start practicing right away.

Step 1: Let Go of Dieting Mentality

If you want to fully regain and reconnect with your hunger cues, you have to ditch external cues, like diets and rules. I know that the idea of quitting dieting can be scary. It won’t happen overnight, but you can start with baby steps. Reassess who you follow on social media and unfollow any diet-y accounts. Begin to focus on nourishment instead of restriction. Get rid of diet cookbooks in your home. Quit getting on your scale (or throw it away, perhaps). When you notice a diet thought pop up, remind yourself it’s normal to keep having these thoughts, but remember that you can choose whether or not you act on that thought. 

Step 2: Start Eating Regularly

Establish regular meal and snack times. This is critical if you have been in a pattern of going long periods without eating (intermittent fasting) or if you’ve been limiting yourself to only 2-3 meals a day. As you begin the journey to regaining hunger cues, I recommend having a schedule of eating, with alarms set to remind you, if necessary. Consistent eating will do wonders to regulate your hunger and hunger cues. Aim for eating every 2-3 hours, with three full meals and 2-3 snacks each day.

Step 3: Tune Into Your Body

Practice mindfulness before, during and after meals. Try to quiet your mind and feel for different symptoms within your body. How does it communicate hunger, satisfaction or fullness?

You can use a hunger and fullness scale, if helpful. It’s a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 is sickeningly famished and 10 is painfully full to bursting. As you progress with your hunger signals, you’d like to avoid letting your hunger get down to the 1-2 range, and aim to wrap up your meal when you’re around an 8 on the fullness scale. 

Step 4: Honor Your Hunger

Part of using the hunger fullness scale (and finishing a meal at a 7 or 8, rather than a 9 or 10) is building trust with your body that you will always respond to its hunger cues. Your body may be used to eating beyond fullness because historically you didn’t supply it with food at regular and predictable intervals. As you begin to eat regularly and frequently (see Step 2) your body will learn that you plan to honor its hunger. 

If you notice yourself feeling judgemental or shameful about the amount or frequency of hunger, try to acknowledge those thoughts, but then discard them. Replace them with a self-affirming mantra like “I am honoring my body’s needs” or “I am compassionately caring for myself.” 

Step 5: Seek Professional Support if Needed

If you feel totally overwhelmed by this kind of work, that’s okay! You are not alone. Everyone is at a different place with their relationship with food, and some people will benefit hugely from partnering with a professional.

If you decide to get some outside help, I recommend working with a Registered Dietitian or therapist who specializes in eating disorders, disordered eating and intuitive eating. If you see that they offer “weight loss” or “weight management” services, red flag! Their approach to health and healing contains conflicting ideas.

I would love to work with you on rebuilding trust with your body. You can download my Hello Intuitive Eating free workbook, or read more about my services here. 

Wishing you all the best!

What is Intuitive Eating?

Overall, to me Intuitive Eating is getting back to your inner intuition and knowledge when it comes to food, eating, and connecting to your body. I say "getting back to" because I believe that everyone is born as an intuitive eater and then as we grow up in the society that we do, we can lose the ability to connect with that inner knowledge and body cues.

How does this happen?

I think the way that it happens is going to be unique for everyone. I also don't want to place blame on any one place. Often times the feeding rituals that we had growing up had the best of intentions, they just might not be how our body wants to naturally operate.

I will give a few examples from my own story.

I grew up in household that was a proud member of the Clean Plate Club. Meaning that I could have no dessert or leave the table until every morsel on my plate was gone, including the boiled spinach with no seasonings and the gigantic glass of milk. Again, not to place blame but I grew up partially with my grandmother, a woman who grew up in The Great Depression and the era of food recommendations like everything cooked with no salt, no fat and that you should drink 2-3 glasses per day of cow's milk to build strong bones (hence the earlier example). This in turn caused be to get the message that even if I was full, the portion that I was given was the right amount for me, dessert was a treat that I only deserve under certain circumstances and vegetables are a disgusting punishment. I also now know the stomach ache I had from drinking dairy was because I was lactose intolerant, not because I was getting too little fiber.

Again, I am telling this story with compassion and understanding towards my grandmother because she was doing what she thought was right and healthy. Of course in retrospect I can see how many of these messages backfired and I had to re-learn and develop a lot of new relationships with foods and my body cues in my adult life.

This is a common thing that I help clients with, though the details will be different. Often times, there are circumstances that causes us to not know how to listen to our bodies anymore, or caused us to think our bodies were broken in some way because they don't do what we want them to do, ie. diet, lose weight, eat no sugar, crave plain boiled spinach, etc.

This is where I see Intuitive Eating come in. When we start to understand our origin stories with food and our bodies we can start to understand where we received the messages that we have today. It's not that your body is broken or needs to be fixed, it's more of a re-learning patterns that work better for you and your body.

It is about re-learning your hunger and fullness cues so at any one time your body tells you what portion of food works best. It is about making vegetables delicious so that not only do you crave them, but they are a staple of the meal because they feel good in your body, and not used as punishment. You have dessert after dinner most times, but sometimes not, because it just doesn't sound that appetizing, but you have that choice because you know it's available to you whenever you want it. You've switched to oat milk and know that you are getting plenty of calcium because it's fortified and you now love spinach.

I definitely don't want to over simplify this process or say it happens overnight. It's complicated, confusing and emotionally uncomfortable a lot of the time. Food is not just food. We are complex humans that have complex feelings and emotions and thoughts about food. But I can say that it's worth it. It's worth every bit of the process because you give yourself the ability to trust your body again. I don't want to sound like a cheesy credit card commercial but to me, this is priceless.

Katy Gaston Nutrition

Katy is a registered dietitian nutritionist and owner of Katy Gaston Nutrition based in San Francisco, CA. Katy is passionate about her work in eating disorders and disordered eating (AKA dieting) and wants to help people heal their relationship with food and body. If you would like to work with Katy in counseling sessions, she is available virtually via her services page below. If you are unable to be a client at this time but would like learn more, click here for a free introduction into intuitive eating workbook!

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Creativity and Eating Disorder Recovery

Do you need Creative Recovery?

Often times when we hear the word 'creativity' we put our defenses up or we run for the hills.

"I'm not a creative person."

"I'm not an artist or anything but I did enjoy my coloring pages as a kid."

"Oh wow, I could never do what you do, you're so artsy."

And I'm going to be that annoying person and say that I truly believe that every person is creative. You just have to find your brand of what that looks like. I don't think everyone is going to be creative in a 'traditional' way or the ways that are usually thought of, but I think everyone has passions or that "thing I've always wanted to try."

Part of reclaiming our creativity is a mindset shift that starts with knowing where these ideas come from.

• How do you feel about your creativity?

• What did you hear about artists growing up?

• What is something that you enjoy but you think it's a little silly?

I think Diet Culture is tied to Hustle Culture which is fed via Perfectionism. All of these things are killers for your creativity.

To do creative things is to feed your soul. It's to get caught up in the moment. It's the transportation into another state of being that is hard to explain.

That is the reason why I think that Creative Recovery is very much tied to Eating Disorder/Disordered Eating Recovery. When we are tying our worth into external markers, we get lost. We think our creativity needs to be the same way. If we don't produce perfect art, there's no point. If we don't produce something of value in the eyes of others, there's no point. If we don't keep up the wears of production at all times, there's no point.

To recover our creativity is to recover a piece of ourselves. A piece of ourselves that calls to us, but we think it's not worthy of the time or energy.

To recover your life from Diet Culture, but from Hustle Culture too. To really tap into our intuitive selves through art, food and body.

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Katy Gaston Nutrition

Katy is a registered dietitian nutritionist and owner of Katy Gaston Nutrition based in San Francisco, CA. Katy is passionate about her work in eating disorders and disordered eating (AKA dieting) and wants to help people heal their relationship with food and body. If you would like to work with Katy in counseling sessions, she is available virtually via her services page below. If you are unable to be a client at this time but would like learn more, click here for a free introduction into intuitive eating workbook!

Services