A Day at an Intuitive Eating Workshop

Today I attended an intuitive eating workshop put on by a local therapist who specializes in disordered eating. She actually has two practices, one where she works with patients with clinical eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia, and another where she works with people like me who are just kind of screwed up with food, but who don’t have a full blown disorder. For both, though, she teaches intuitive eating.

All in all, it was an interesting experience. It was just myself and two other women in a five and a half hour workshop that included lunch. So there was plenty of time to have personal one-on-one attention and ask questions. I won’t say there was a lot of information that I haven’t already picked up in books like Intuitive Eating or Women, Food, and God, but I definitely got some good tips. And there were a few things that I’m definitely processing and will probably talk about in a later post, after I’ve had the chance to mull them over a bit more. Plus, she will be doing some follow-up via e-mail, which I think will be helpful, as I’ve already thought of some questions I wish I had asked but that didn’t occur to me at the time.

One really good takeaway I got was that the whole stopping when satisfied thing is one of the hardest steps to master and that it definitely takes a lot of time. I’ve been beating myself up because I still can’t stop cleaning my plate (the leave one bite challenge has been much more challenging than I anticipated!). It’s so like me to feel like I’m screwing up when things don’t come to me instantaneously. But for being only seven weeks into this journey, I’m doing okay. That’s really good to know. I’m still going to keep doing the leave one bite challenge, but I’m going to leave the judgment behind. It’ll come to me when it’s meant to. And that’s just fine.