Statistics may vary to the exact % but one thing is clear: most women are dissatisfied with their body.

Research released by Dove, for their ‘Self-Esteem Project’, found that 96% of women in the UK reported feeling anxious about the way they look, compared with 86% in China, 72% in Brazil, and 61% in the US. Only 4% of the women in all the countries surveyed would consider themselves ‘beautiful’, and by the time girls reach 17, 78% will be ‘unhappy with their bodies’.

Women don’t diet because they enjoy dieting. Women who diet do it because they think they have to. These women think they are their body, thus,  their bodies’ ability to meet the diet culture expectations define their worth.

Helping women leave and recover from diet culture is a feminist issue.

Why a non-diet approach for women?

Feminism and diet culture

The intersection between diet culture & women history

Women socialization to diet culture

Women internalization of diet culture

Dieting is a feminist issue

Women empowerment

Non-diet Approach for women Professional Training

Non-diet Approach for women mentorship

If you would like to listen to the article in audio format the Going Beyond The Food Show – Pro Series Season 1 Episode 6

Links mentioned in the episode…

Mentorship Program

Free Intake Forms

Free Training & resources

Undiet Your Coaching Podcast

feminism and diet culture

Why a non-diet approach for women?

When women first seek to stop dieting, they think they need to “fix” their “food issue”.  After years of dieting they’ve been told in many different ways that the issue was them, not the food. That if they could eat “normally” they would finally achieve their “normal body”. Sounds familiar?

It’s normal that your future client thinks like this… that’s all they’ve ever known. They’ve spent their life wondering why they struggle with food and if they could only “fix what’s wrong with them and food,” life would unlock their dreams.

The truth is: they have no issues with food. In fact, as we discovered in S1 EP 1 Intuitive eating Mentorship – First do no harm for us, as practitioners, to validate their thoughts about food and them being the issue can cause more harm. The way they engage with food now is the result of the restriction of dieting. Dieting is the issue not food. But why do your clients diet? As we’ve learned in the last episode: fatphobia: the fear of fatness.

A weight-neutral approach to health

The non-diet approach helps clients stop dieting, make peace with food and body image. It’s a weight-neutral approach to health that helps people reconnect to their innate power and become their own expert at their bodies.

Although the non-diet approach is gender-neutral, I believe that a segment of the healing approach should address the specific forces pulling at each gender/ sex: Cis-women, Cis-men, Trans, Genderqueer, non-binary, etc… I believe that each gender should have non-diet professionals that understand the specificities and struggle for each group for the best care.

The Going Beyond The Food Method™️ is for people that identify as women. I created this methodology based on my experience as a cis-woman over the last 45 years. As a person in a women’s body who has been exposed to the force of patriarchy and its attempt to control me as a woman and my body.

feminism and diet culture

Feminism & diet culture

First, let’s take a step back and understand patriarchy. Patriarchy is a social system in which men hold primary power and predominate in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social privilege, and control of properties. Patriarchy views men as dominant and women as submissive.

One of the many ways in which patriarchy attempts to dominate women is by exerted forces that dictate how women handle their bodies: reproduction, sexuality, beauty, and yes, body size and shape.

Most recently over the last 100 years, Diet Culture has become the cultural form of oppression on women’s bodies. Diet culture judges women’s worth based on their physical body size and looks. It assigns moral values to the ability of women to meet up with their standards.

The diet culture keeps women focusing on their bodies. Dieting keeps women distracted on food, exercise, and trying harder at restricting instead of using their innate resources to achieving much more important things in their life. Given that the tools proposed to women to achieve their “ideal body according to patriarchy” doesn’t work, it keeps women thinking they are the problem and not the diet. Women keep doubting themselves, their abilities, their capacities, and their obsession with trying to make up for what they are told are a personal failure to achieve the “good enough body”.

It is my belief as a health professional that women must understand why they “chase” a smaller body to their healing and recovery. For women, to truly liberate themselves from diet culture and its chain, they must know why society created it in the first place.

The intersection between diet culture & women history

If you look through history, their beauty or body didn’t always control women. Instead, their ability to procreate and religion controlled women. It’s not until recently that women’s bodies became the center of attention.

The mid 19^th century

The feminist movement was beginning to form as women gain access to education. Women involved themselves in the abolition movement and women continued asking for their own political power. As women become more vocal and demanding more power, patriarchy responded with pressure on women’s bodies to be smaller.

feminism and diet culture

The Gibson Girl

The Gibson Girl was born in 1880. This was the personification of the feminine ideal of physical attractiveness as portrayed by male artist Charles Dana Gibson. This body female ideal was heavily promoted and published via the new magazine and printing industry. So, ensure product advertisement ways to look like Gibson’s girl: beauty products, pills, cream, arsenic pills, etc…Diet culture was born. This period also introduced ready-made clothes and women needed to “fit” clothes when up to then clothes were made to fit women.

feminism and diet culture

The Flapper girl

As the suffragette movement began to gain the right to vote in many countries, the Flapper girl was born. Women became “liberated” from the Gibson girl corset only to find themselves binding their natural feminine curve into the linear look of the 1920’s. Thinness was a sign of “perceived freedom” for women. This solidified the diet culture.

feminism and diet culture

Twiggy

With every gain in socio-economic power, women gained a smaller and smaller body ideal. Whereas the first-wave feminism in the early 90’s focused mainly on suffrage and political power, the second-wave feminism that began in the late 1960’s was focused on equality issues. That’s when Twiggy became the first supermodel; willowy, thin, adolescent physique.

feminism and diet culture

The 80’s

In the 80’s as women affirmed their new equality, came the low-calories, low-fat, and aerobic era with Jane Fonda as the leader. Calories counting began and this is when women became obsessed with dieting.

feminism and diet culture

And it continues up to today. The 90’s saw Kate Moss as the body ideal for all women. With an even smaller body than Twiggy, women’s ideal was body waifish, extremely thin described as “Heroin Chic”.  The ’00s saw the Victoria Secret angels, and today we have the influencer healthy body ideal throne by the Kardashian.

“A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one”

– Naomi Wolfe

Women socialization to diet culture

Socialization is the process of internalizing the norms and ideologies of society. It may lead to a desirable outcome and in certain aspects of life ensure our survival.

Socialization to diet culture and female body ideal happens at a very young for women. When were you gifted your first Barbie?

Among many societal behaviors, Their body, their beauty, and being a “good girl” defined women. Society conditioned women to please using their bodies. While society defined boys to be strong, intelligent, and non-emotional.

Most women who diet chronically today encountered their first diet in their early teens. They first observed their female caregiver being “dissatisfied” with their body and dieting. As these women entered their puberty and began awakening to being attractive, they engage with their first diet. Worse, some women experienced diet before the age of 10 as their parents wanted to prevent the “shame” of being in a non-conventional body.

feminism and diet culture

Women internalization of diet culture

The process of internalization pertains to the person’s acceptance of a set of norms and values established by others and learned through socialization.

Women internalized diet culture in their teens leading to adulthood. This is when of having to please, as a woman, using among other things our body moves from outside of our own mind to being part of our own mind. At that point, diet culture has shaped who we are as a woman.

As we discussed in a previous article Non-diet Approach: Addressing the root cause, fatphobia is at the root as to why women diet. The process of diet culture internalization leads women to be fatphobic. They fear of being fat. They fear others judging their body as a fat body. It’s said that women fear weight gain more than illness.

Women’s fear of being in a non-confirming body is validated daily. Hundreds, if not thousands of times, marketing images and words, social media, conversation with other women, medical treatment, the beauty industry, etc… remind women that they should fear to be in a non-thin ideal body.

To cope with this constant pressure, women adapt. Diet Brain is a term I coined that best expresses how women adapt to diet culture socialization and internalization. To adapt, women become people-pleasers, we expect perfection for ourselves in the hope to offset our inability to be in a confirming body ideal. While the solution to achieve this thin ideal, “dieting” has a 91-95% failure rate, we blame ourselves for it not working so we adopt an “All or nothing” mindset when it comes to food and health.

This adaptation process is unique to people identifying as women and is the reason why Non-Diet Coaching Certification is essential for health professionals helping women recover from diet culture.

“Your dislike of yourself is a side effect of the POISON you are being fed. None of this messaging is real. Your inner bully has learned the lies society fed it, and is giving you fake news about your looks, your value, your worth, your right to be happy. I’m so sorry you have to deal with this crap. Diet Culture is just making you hate yourself for a profit”

– Naomie Wolfe

Dieting is a feminist issue

Opting out of diet culture as a woman is more than simply stopping dieting.  It’s a feminist act. When we stop buying into the diet culture definition of what being a woman is, we reclaim our power back. We say no to being our bodies. We say yes to trusting and respecting ourselves first.

Helping women recover from the diet culture must include the education to how we got to be where we are today as women. That we were capable to feed ourselves, to care for ourselves, and to be more than our bodies. The socialization and internalization of diet culture are what created the beliefs that lead us to dieting and trying to fit in using our own body against ourselves.

One of the paths to reclaim our power from the diet culture can be with intuitive eating. Using our source of shame, that is food, can actually rebuild a relationship of trust and respect towards our own selves. As we reconnect to our innate body wisdom, we get to witness the power that is within us.

As we build confidence in our innate capacity to feed ourselves, we can continue to use diet culture source of shame to regain our power as women. Healing our body image and crafting a new way to be in our human body shell is not only necessary but very empowering.

“If your self-esteem is dependent on external result, you have given all your happiness and agency away. It’s an exhausting, and powerless way to live.”

Women empowerment

Individual autonomy is this idea that refers to the capacity to be one’s own person, to live one’s life according to reasons and motives as one’s own and not the product of manipulative or distorting external forces.

Leaving the jail of diet culture is a revolutionary act for women to not only be autonomous but to claim their power back from a patriarchal society that suppressed our empowerment.

In today’s society, the greatest punishment is to take away people’s autonomy and freedom by sending them to jail. Diet culture has taken women’s autonomy and freedom. Diet culture robs women of the capacity to be in their now body, to feed themselves naturally, to wear clothes they desire, to decide their own beauty standards, etc…

Helping women recover from diet culture is truly about empowering women to live their full life today… unconditionally. Choosing to accept your body is hard but doing hard “things” is what builds confidence in women… not body size. Saying ‘no’ to outside control and ‘yes’ to inner power is what builds self-esteem in women, not beauty.

Non-diet Approach for women Training

The non-diet approach is the exact opposite of dieting. It’s a weight-neutral approach to health and nutrition that empowers women to become the expert of their own body. That shifts women from being their body to supporting their body so they can live their full life… right now!

The Going Beyond The Food Method™️ is our proprietary methodology that helps women to recover from diet culture and learn the non-diet way of life. Firstly, our 4 pillars are Body Wisdom, Body Trust, Body Respect, and Body Neutrality. Secondly, our framework is composed of 5 steps process: Intuitive Eating, Body Neutrality, Self-Coaching, Emotional Intelligence, and Mindfulness.

You can learn and transform your life with the Going Beyond The Food Method with our two signature program.

Undiet Your Life Program was created for women to learn self-coaching, a powerful mindset self-coaching tool to unlearn diet culture & patriarchy socialization along side with Intuitive Eating and Body Neutrality.

Non-Diet Coaching Certification was created for providers and coaches wanting to deliver the Non-Diet Approach in their practice following the Going Beyond The Food Method.

Want to know if the Non-Diet Approach and The Going Beyond The Food Method can be of support to you? Get my starter pack and complete the three assessment: eating, body image and mindset.

You can also listen to our non-diet podcast.

Non-Diet Approach Certification program

The Going Beyond The Food non-diet coaching certification program is a space where you can receive support guidance to become the best non-diet professional. It’s a program that will refine your non-diet professional skills set to empower women and teach you the skills you need to build a successful business that can impact thousands of women.

It helps you develop as a powerful leader and help other women come back to their power. You learn how to harness your ability to support and help other women. As a result, you can impact thousands of other women and dismantle diet culture.

But is the non-diet approach addressing the real root cause?

In the first three years of clinical practice, I thought I was addressing the root cause of my patient health concerns. I was asking a lot of questions and doing an in-depth assessment. My goal was uncovering the “real issue” that no other health professional had identified yet. This unidentified root cause was, as per my training in functional medicine, the reason why my clients were “still struggling”.

As I shared in Intuitive eating Mentorship – First do no harm although my patient had short term reliefs…. long term, their health wasn’t better. In fact, in many cases, it was worse.

So, was I really addressing the “real root cause”?

What’s the root cause?

Why healing the root cause is so important

The non-diet approach

Weight stigma

Fatphobia

Body Image healing

Health can be weight neutral

The Non-diet Approach Professional Training

Non-diet Approach mentorship

If you would like to listen to the article in audio format the Going Beyond The Food Show – Pro Series Season 1 Episode 5

Links mentioned in the episode…

Women Food and Power

Non-Diet Coaching Certification Program

Free Training & resources

Undiet Your Coaching Podcast

What’s the root cause?

In my training in holistic health & functional medicine, we are trained on addressing the underlying or root cause of chronic disease, taking into account the whole person including their environment, genetics, and lifestyle factors. Addressing the root cause is a fundamental philosophy, and honestly, the pride of alternative health approaches: resolving the root cause vs. just dealing with side effects.

Even beyond the health sector, the root cause is the cause of a problem. If adequately addressed, it will prevent a recurrence of that problem. By asking the question “why” a few times, the root cause of a problem is often identified as a procedural, or management, shortcoming.

For example, imagine you have a lot of weed growing in your lawn. If you remove the weed using a lawnmower, will that solve the problem? Temporarily, yes. Visually, your lawn looks good. However, you probably know that this is only at the surface level. After a short period of time, the weed will grow back. So, how do you fix this long term? If you replied “By removing the weed from the root,” then you are totally right!

As a nutritionist, people came to me to change their eating habits or to address health issues that they thought were caused by food. However, my training had taught me that the root cause was in the: what, when and how they ate.

What I couldn’t understand was why it wasn’t working? Why were my clients not able to adhere to the in-depth protocols? Why were they disappearing after a few sessions? And why, when I would see them a year or two down the road, they had reverted back to their old habits?

Why healing the root cause is so important

If I was healing the root cause, then this shouldn’t be happening. I knew this from my training. So, I started to research and quickly realize I wasn’t addressing the “real root cause” but still just the “ side effects”.

It’s understandable why we are inclined to deal with effects instead of the root cause. Effects are what’s most immediately observable, so it’s easy to act on them. Think here “size of body”. Upon doing so, you see an instantaneous change — an impression that you have progressed in your goals. When you go on a diet, you lose a small amount of weight immediately. That’s until the diet stopped working and you regain all the weight (most often more than the original amount of weight loss).

On the other hand, trying to uncover the root causes can be tedious, complicated, and at times, scary. Sometimes, to the extent where people run away when they realize the root cause problems that are underneath.  Subsequently, addressing these root causes often requires a change of thinking and some pain and effort, but the results will be much permanent and higher-value than correcting side effects (symptoms as known in health).

As we touched in our  S1 EP3 podcast episode Diet mindset professional training, we unpack how our certain traits of character are the results of dieting.

Here are just some of the real root causes:

• Perfectionism (Effect): Need to have “perfect” diet (Effect): Diet Cycle (Effect): Desire to lose weight (Effect): Body Dissatisfaction (Effect): beliefs about what body should look like (Cause): fatphobia/weight stigma (Cause)
• Low self-confidence (Effect): Need to lose weight (Effect): Perfectionist Body Fantasy(Effect): beliefs about what body should look like (Effect): fatphobia/weight stigma (Cause)
• Binge eating (Effect): food restriction (Effect): Dieting to lose weight (Effect) : fatphobia/weight stigma (Cause)

The root cause wasn’t in the what, when, and how they ate.  It was in the why. In my first few years of practice, I stopped asking why too early in my investigation process. Even when I asked “Why do you eat like this?” “Why do you want to lose weight?”…I was blinded by my own fatphobia.

Fatphobia

Fatphobia is the fear and dislike of obese “fat” people and/or “obesity”.  I was fatphobic and was profoundly afraid of gaining weight. In fact, I was professionally trained to believe that “fat” was the root cause of most chronic conditions. I was taught that everyone should be or want to be at a “normal BMI”.

Hence, I had to confront my own and discover the truth about body weight, BMI & health to be able to ask the right question with my patient and for my own recovery from diet culture.

Not only was my own fatphobia preventing from being the best health professional I knew I could be, but it also was keeping from accessing my best health. Fatphobia in research is also described as weight stigma. Research recognizes two forms of weight stigma:

Experienced weight stigma

This occurs when people observe or believe that others have made unfair negative assumptions about them or discriminate based on nothing more than their weight or body image.

Internalized weight stigma

This is the process by which people accept weight-based stereotypes and make them true about themselves. People who have internalized weight stigma are the harshest critic of themselves. They have come to believe that they are “less-than” because of their weight/ body image.

Research is pointing out that internalized weight stigma has the greatest impact on physical and mental health over experienced weight stigma.

“Some people fear that if people feel too good about their bodies and themselves, they will not be motivated to engage in healthful eating behaviors and physical activity. Studies show the exact opposite to be true: When people internalize weight stigma and feel bad about themselves because of their weight, they feel less confident in their ability to engage in healthful behaviors and are more prone to binge eating, avoiding physical activity, and other behaviors that contribute to weight gain.”

 – Rebecca Pearl, PhD, an assistant professor of psychology at Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Weight stigma is the REAL root cause

Weight stigma is the negative attitudes and beliefs about people because of their weight. It leads to the labeling of people with stereotypes based on their weight. Unfortunately, it’s a common belief that weight stigma will motivate people who don’t meet body size ideals to change their behaviors, in order to avoid further stigma.

Weight stigma originated from the “old school” model of behavior changes through punishment or shaming. A great example of this today is the “before and after” picture we see so frequently on social media. They are unfortunately used by many health professionals.

Weight stigma is a centric element of diet culture. In fact, research has demonstrated that diet culture helps frame a larger body as a “health hazard”.  I like to explain it to my students as the “goon” of diet culture. Without it, diet culture may stop existing.

Weight stigma has been researched extensively over the last 20 years. What research overwhelmingly shows is that weight stigma doesn’t encourage people to lose weight or improve their health. Instead, stigma leads to a greater risk of depression, poor body image, and self-esteem. It also leads to increased stress, disordered eating behaviors, and avoidance of physical activity.

Weight stigma has also been linked to many common health problems that were first associated with “obesity”.  Is “obesity” or the stigma associated with “obesity” the true culprit?  As you can imagine, experts and researchers are divided on this question. Since we acknowledge that weight stigma is causing the health issue, then diet culture will need to be condoned publicly… can you see the issue?

You can read more Cyclic Obesity Weight Based Stigma Model.

The Solution: Body Image healing

The only way to address the real root cause is to include body image healing in your practice/ program.

Making peace with my own body and healing my own body image was the path to releasing my own fatphobia. Doing so unlock my ability to end weight stigmatization in my own practice.

What most health professional doesn’t realize is that our individual body image is not only how we see ourselves when we look in the mirror. It’s also multidimensional. It encompasses:

• Perceptual body image: how you see your body
• Affective body image: how you feel about your body
• Cognitive body image: how you think about your body
• Behavioral body image: the way we behave as a result of our perceptual, affective, and cognitive body image.

Research is showing that a distorted body image leads to lower self-esteem, distorted relationship to food, depression, anxiety, hormonal disruption, and many other side effects. Many of our clients and patients come to see us for this in the first place.

Thomas F. Cash, PhD, is a true pioneer in the psychology of physical appearance research. He also developed today’s most effective treatment approach to body image issues, as well as many of the measures used in body-image research. Likewise, the body image healing cognitive-behavioral model  is at the center of our proprietary non-diet approach, The Going Beyond The Food Method™️ .

Body Neutrality

In our non-diet clinical approach, we teach our clients the body neutrality framework and not body positivity. It includes body image professional training, the body neutrality framework.

Body Neutrality empowers women to embrace themselves as they are, including the parts they don’t like about themselves. Its focus is to avoid self-hate while simultaneously relieving from the pressure of having to love their body. Most importantly, the goal is to respect and accept your body for what it is – and that’s it.

Body Neutrality is the middle ground between positivity and negativity (shaming). Embracing body neutrality over body positivity allows our clients to experience negative feelings about their bodies, but without the pressure that comes with having to be positive all the time.

Body Neutrality helps women detach their self-worth from their bodies (good or bad). It’s about crafting a relationship of functionality with our bodies and engaging with it from a place of self-care instead of control.

Health can be weight-neutral

The World Health Organization defines health as “a complete state of physical, emotional, and social well-being, not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” A weight-neutral approach to health is based on the idea that your health status or risk level can’t be determined solely by your weight.

It acknowledges that your weight is determined by a complex set of genetic, metabolic, physiological, cultural, social, and behavioral determinants. Many of these factors are either difficult or impossible to change.

Instead of focusing on a weight-oriented outcome, weight-neutral programs teach you to take charge of the factors within your control. These factors include your thoughts and behaviors. In short, taking charge of these factors will help you improve your well-being, regardless of your weight.

Weight-neutral approaches to health like the non-diet approach have significantly decreased body dissatisfaction, disordered eating, and depression. They’ve also increased sustainable, enjoyable self-care behaviors such as eating and moving well in the long term.

A 2013 study by the Journal of Obesity found no link between body weight and the way we feel about ourselves. Yet, the findings show a link between how we feel about ourselves and the healthy activities we engage in. Meaning, the better we feel about our bodies the more likely we are to take care of them by eating well and being active, allowing us to create a positive cycle.   Likewise, dissatisfaction with our bodies can discourage us from taking part in certain activities, eating properly to fuel our bodies and can eventually lead to weight gain.

The non-diet approach

The non-diet approach to health and nutrition recognizes that weight stigma is a contributor to one’s health.  As professionals, we must address how our clients and patients relate to their body as the root cause before we can effectively address the effects ( eating and health habits).

The non-diet approach to health is the exact opposite of dieting. It’s a weight-neutral approach to health that instead focuses on a weight-oriented outcome. This approach focused on all the other factors that can impact one’s health beyond body weight. In other words, the ultimate goal is to support the patients to become their own experts at their bodies.

The Going Beyond The Food Method™️ is our proprietary methodology that helps women to recover from diet culture and learn the non-diet way of life. Firstly, our 4 pillars are Body Wisdom, Body Trust, Body Respect, and Body Neutrality. Secondly, our framework is composed of 5 steps process: Intuitive eating, Body Neutrality, Self-Coaching, Emotional Intelligence, and Mindfulness.

The non-diet approach professional training center

We have created a number of free non-diet approach training resources to help you begin learning more about this revolutionary health approach. Join my non-diet professional community by requesting our non-diet client assessment tools

You can also listen to our non-diet podcast.

You can access non-diet approach training here

The non-diet coaching certification program

The Going Beyond The Food non-diet coaching certification program is a space where you can receive support guidance to become the best non-diet professional. It’s a program geared to refine your non-diet professional skills set and teach you the skills you need to build a successful business that can impact thousands of women.

It will help you develop as a powerful leader and help other women come back to their power. You will learn how to harness your ability to support and help other women. As a result, you can impact thousands of other women and dismantle diet culture.

Ready to get started with the Non-Diet Approach?

You can access all of our services on our work with us page.  We have a number of programs and service levels enabling us to serve most women:

Free Resources and Masterclasses: Get started and get to know us better!

Private coaching with Stephanie and her team Stephanie and her team of Certified Non-Diet Coaches are waiting to support you in a one-to-one setting with an individualized plan.

Undiet Your Life group coaching program is for women to learn how to eat intuitively, become body neutral, and learn self-coaching at their own pace while being supported in a group setting by Stephanie and her team of Certified Non-Diet Coaches.

Non-Diet Coaching Certification for professionals ready to integrate the Going Beyond The Food Method™️ in their practice and for women wanting to become  Certified Coach and build a business coaching other women beyond the food.

Any non-diet business coaching must include a segment on non-diet marketing.

For many, the words marketing is “yucky” or even “salesy”. Many of my new intuitive eating business students at first will tell me “I hate that part of my job”. Is that you, too?

If you are a health professional and have a private practice, then marketing is a vital part of your business. This is even more relevant for non-diet approach health practice.

To help you fall in love with marketing so that you can thrive in your business, this article will discuss…

Understand the non-diet business coaching framework

The best non-diet marketing strategy

3 pillars of non-diet marketing

Ideal Client Readiness

Emotional Connection

Nurturing

Professional Training Center

Non-diet mentorship program

If you would like to listen to the article in audio format the Going Beyond The Food Show – Pro Series Season 1 Episode 4

Links mentioned in the episode…

Non-Diet Certification Program

Free Intuitive Eating Guide

Free Training & Resources

Podcast Undiet Your Coaching

Understand the Non-Diet Business Coaching Framework

Let’s lay down the groundwork first about the non-diet approach before we get into the marketing aspect.

The non-diet approach to health is the exact opposite of dieting. It’s a weight-neutral approach to health that instead of focusing on a weight-oriented outcome. This approach focused on all the other factors that can impact one’s health beyond body weight. In other words, the ultimate goal is to support the patients to become their own experts at their bodies.

The Going Beyond The Food Method™️ is our proprietary methodology that helps women to recovery from diet culture and learns the non-diet way of life. Firstly, our 4 pillars are Body Wisdom, Body Trust, Body Respect, and Body Neutrality. Secondly, our framework is composed of 5 steps process: Intuitive eating, Body Neutrality, Self-Coaching, Emotional Intelligence, and Mindfulness.

The non-diet business coaching framework teaches women health practitioners on how to build successful non-diet businesses. I share the basics of this framework in the first two podcast episodes of the Going Beyond The Food Show Non-Diet PRO.  The Intuitive eating Mentorship episode and Intuitive eating Business episode.

 Marketing to our future client can appear to be challenging at first. as I argued in my article Diet mindset professional training, our future clients have been used and abused by diet culture and have a very low tolerance to traditional fear-based marketing tactics.  Hence, non-diet marketing should be based on love, education, and nurturing. We help people build and grow a profitable anti-diet business that makes good money inside the Good Money Mastermind

The Best Non-Diet Marketing Strategy

Marketing is the art of making change happen.

The success of non-diet marketing resides in the overall non-diet business strategy you have created for your business. So, let me repeat this very important point again: a marketing strategy is part of this overall business strategy.  Do you have one of these?

An effective non-diet marketing strategy will help tell a compelling story about your offer/product in a way that will help your niche market (future client/patient) connect to your offer/product with a strong desire to commit (purchase). As a result, the commitment of resources leads to transformation for your client and equal sales and revenue in your business.

The 3 pillars of non-diet marketing

I will be covering the 3 pillars of an effective and profitable non-diet marketing strategy we teach inside the Good Money Mastermind and inside the Non-Diet Coaching Certification.

Pillar 1: Ideal Client Readiness

Trying to please everyone is the #1 marketing mistake that I observed in the health & wellness business sector. This is why the second element of a successful business strategy should include a comprehensive analysis of your ideal client and niche market. After that, you can create a unique marketing initiative that connects with your future clients.

Trying to convince people they need to change is the #2 marketing mistake I observed in the health & wellness business sector. That’s because not all your future clients are ready for your non-diet message now. If your future clients are still deeply entrenched in diet culture, then it will be a complete waste of your time and resource to market to them. Therefore, they need first to be open to a new approach.

Time and time again, women non-diet health entrepreneurs make these mistakes because they operate from fear instead of love. Fear of missing revenue and excluding potential clients is the main denominator of this fear.

By trying to please everyone, you actually prevent your niche clients from connecting with you and most importantly, take action towards their own transformation. Consequently, you prevent your business from being successful.

Therefore, your marketing strategy needs to ensure you connect to your unique niche market and with those in your niche ready to take action towards their own transformation.

Inside our Non-diet  Coaching Certification Program, we teach a unique blueprint that blends in the transtheoretical model of transformation with basic marketing techniques.

Pillar 2: Emotional Connection

Our future client has been used and abused by diet culture and the weight loss industry. They have bought a lot of weight loss products out of desperation, and as we know, nothing has worked. Hence, your future clients need not only a different approach but also a different type of marketing.

Emotional marketing refers to marketing and advertising efforts that primarily use emotion to make your audience notice, remember, share, and buy (commit). It taps into the innate human desire to FEEL.  Certainly, this is critical to a women-based audience.

The goal is to validate the way they FEEL now and show them how they can FEEL different later (after committing to your product). This type fo marketing helps out future clients buy from their hearts. This is because studies shows that people rely on emotions, rather than rational, to make decisions.

Emotional marketing inspires people to act. Similarly, it encourages more interaction between you and your brand long term which is critical to developing a sustainable non-diet business. Out of 1,400 successful marketing campaigns, those with purely emotional content performed twice as better as those with only rational content.

The most effective way to connect emotionally with your ideal client is to tell stories.

Pillar 3: Nurturing

The last pillar of a successful non-diet marketing strategy is to create a relationship of trust and credibility with your ideal client. That’s because the vast majority of your future clients will be doubtful given their experience thus far with diet culture. I know I was…. You?

Inside the non-diet coaching certification mentorship program & The Good Money Mastermind, we refer to this step of the program the “Non-Diet Marketing Funnel”. Think a liquid funnel here…. it’s the journey your client will go through as they enter your world.

Although we as non-diet health professionals are very familiar with a weight-neutral approach to health, our future customer is not. We have to face the facts: we live in a society that is fatphobic and heavily entrenched in weight loss approaches. In other words, we are the infancy stage of a non-diet world…

Hence, we need to educate our future clients to the non-diet approach. With each new interaction with potential clients, we need to educate and educate some more. And when you think you are done educating… educate some more lol! Likewise, you need to move your ideal client along your non-diet marketing from not knowing about the non-diet approach to understanding the basics of the non-diet approach. This needs to happen before they commit (purchase) to anything with you.

As your ideal client moves further down into your non-diet funnel, they will start trusting you and see you as an expert in this approach. As a result, they will be more willing to take a risk with what seems to them as a “completely crazy” approach to their problem: to ditch dieting, learn to eat intuitively, and accept their body.

Non-Diet Business Coaching Training Center

Would you like to see an example of nurturing in the non-diet world? If not done yet, join my non-diet professional community by requesting our starter pack for training for intuitive eating. I’ll send you the nurturing funnel I have built for professionals.

We also have created for you a number of free non-diet professional training resources to help you begin your research in the field of non-diet approach to health. You will find non-diet online training, webinars, podcasts, and articles.

You can access all of our services on our work with us page.  We have a number of programs and service levels enabling us to serve most women:

Free Resources and Masterclasses: Get started and get to know us better!

Private coaching with Stephanie and her team Stephanie and her team of Certified Non-Diet Coaches are waiting to support you in a one-to-one setting with an individualized plan.

Undiet Your Life group coaching program is for women to learn how to eat intuitively, become body neutral, and learn self-coaching at their own pace while being supported in a group setting by Stephanie and her team of Certified Non-Diet Coaches.

Non-Diet Coaching Certification for professionals ready to integrate the Going Beyond The Food Method™️ in their practice and for women wanting to become  Certified Coach and build a business coaching other women beyond the food.

Non-Diet Business Mentorship 

The Good Money Business Mastermind is training program for an non-diet business and non-diet professional mentorship program. A business mentorship specifically designed and curated to support  service provider in the anti-diet culture niche. Make good money helping people liberate themselves from diet & wellness culture!

This is what I was seeking but couldn’t find years ago.

Diet mindset professional support  to unlearn the diet culture thoughts training was not available when I started my transition to a non-diet approach to nutrition and health as a clinical nutritionist; had to figure it out on my own. Piece it all together…

In this podcast episode First Do No Harm: The Intuitive Eating Mentorship Journey I argued that the current model of practice for a nutrition professional top-down approach is causing more harm to a particular segment of our clients: women on the diet roller coster.

The solution: The bottom-up approach. Start first with addressing the diet mindset so we can move to coach nutrition and health later in the journey. Enter diet mindset professional training!

In this article, we will cover:

Diet Mindset Professional Training

How human make food choices

How the diet mindset develops

Common thought errors

Diet Brain: The adaptation

Self-Coaching for Intuitive eating

If you would like to listen to the article in audio format the Going Beyond The Food Show – Pro Series Season 1 Episode 3

Links mentioned in the episode…

Non-Diet Coaching Certification

Intuitive Eating Guide

 Free Training & resources

Undiet Your Coaching Podcast

Set Point Podcast 

Self-Coaching Article

Diet Mindset Professional Training

In my professional studies as a clinical nutritionist, we barely touched upon the psychology of eating or diet mindset professional training. We jumped right into the WHAT to eat emphasizing greatly why it was so important to our health with a lot of facts and data.

So, I went into private practice and model what I had learned. Spending hours creating a complex protocol. Very quickly, I realized that wasn’t going to work… clients were overwhelmed and scared of the complexity of what they would have to do. I went to what I was taught: trying to convince them with studies, facts, and data as to why restricting this and that food was essential to their health. That didn’t work either.

Why wasn’t it working? Back then, I had no answer but today after years of independent studies I can tell you why: intellectual knowledge is not what motivates humans to change or make different choices. Especially not with food. The answer diet mindset professional training.

How human make food choices

So, if data points and fear-mongering isn’t an effective tool to help people change their eating habits, what is?

Of course, the primary driver to food choices is hunger however, what we choose to eat is not only our physiological and nutritional needs. Many other factors influence our food choice according to research:

Biological Determinants

For example, our innate eating cues hunger, fullness, and satisfaction which is what is recognized as eating cues in the world of intuitive eating coaching. You can also include here Set Point theory which I discussed in depth with Chris Sandle on our Going Beyond The Food Show podcast series about weight loss.

Economic Determinants

In sum, here we can think of cost, income, availability of food which is truly out of our control as health practitioners. These are major issues with the newest version of diet culture: the Wellness Diet.

Physical Determinants

For example, access, education, skills (e.g. cooking skills), and time availability which are mostly out of our control as health practitioners.

Social Determinants

This aspect of our food choices such as culture, family, peers, and meal patterns are mostly out of reach for us as health practitioners except one that is particularly relevant to our segment of women who have been chronic dieters: weight discrimination.

There is emerging evidence that experiences with weight stigma may lead to different eating behavior. For example, individuals ate more food after exposure to a weight stigmatizing condition. Additionally, in a study, 79 percent of women reported coping with weight stigma on multiple occasions by eating more food.

A properly structured non-diet approach to health engages clients and patients in learning coping skills to help reduce the impact of weight stigma.

Psychological Determinants

This is the world of mind and emotions. Elements such as mood, stress, and guilt are one area that as non-diet health professionals should be included in our approach.

Today, it is widely recognized that food influences our mood, and that mood has a strong influence on our choice of food. For this reason, these determinants are the first 3 pillars of the Going Beyond The Food Method™️ .

Attitudes, beliefs, and knowledge about food

This is where we include intellectual knowledge about food but also include all the constructed food beliefs pass down to us from the weight loss & wellness industries in order to sell their products.

How the diet mindset develops

What’s unique about our eating behaviors, unlike many other biological functions, is too often subject to sophisticated cognitive control.

We consciously manipulate our food choices beyond the need of our bodies to achieve other external gains/ goals in our life. One of the most widely practiced forms of cognitive control over food intake is dieting (cognitive dietary restraint).

In most studies on the topic of food choices, it’s most often observed that women and men behave differently with food. In this study, women reported significantly higher restraint, more guilt after eating in various types of social situations, and more overeating in reaction to unpleasant emotional state mood.

Women’s bodies are imposed on different beauty standards than men’s bodies. Diet Culture reinforces the thin ideals to women leading 91% of women in western societies to dislike their bodies and using dieting (cognitive food restraint) to meet diet culture expectations of their body size and beauty.

With repeated failed attempts at dieting, dieting has a 91%-95% failure rate over 5 years period, women’s brain & body develops coping mechanism as a mean of surviving diet failure and weight stigma. This is why we need diet mindset professional training!

Common thought errors or cognitive distortion

When it comes to how we think, the dieter’s brain adapts using what we know as cognitive distortion or thought errors.

Let’s take a step back first to make sure we all understand how the human brain functions.

When faced with an event or a trigger, labelled in the model below as circumstances then given an interpretation. This interpretation is based on our long-held beliefs, past experiences, values system including diet culture. We then form an opinion, a thought which then ignites an emotion. The emotions we feel then creates the actions or behaviours we take. The collective action we take then creates our result.

Cognitive Behavioral Coaching Model

Over time, the brain, or mind, adopts a “way of thinking” as a means to survive what we perceive as a difficult situation. These flaws in thinking are known as cognitive distortions or thought errors. This is what keeps women in the cycle of dieting and body shaming even though it has proven to be a very ineffective way of living life.

• Mental filtering
• Jumping to conclusions
• Personalization
• Black and white thinking
• Catastrophizing
• Overgeneralization
• Labelling
• Emotional reasoning
• Magnifying/ Minimizing

Over the years of working with women in a non-diet model of care approach, and my personal journey in recovering from 25 years dieting career, I have observed a pattern in cognitive distortion. I coined the term Diet Brain to better express this pattern.

Diet Mindset & Diet Brain

Diet brain, the term I coined a few years back, is the collective of 4-main thought errors. In my clinical observation and personal experience overcoming each one, this pattern that is present in most women chronic dieters I have worked. What are these traits?

All or nothing / Black and White thinking

This can be best described as the on the diet / off the diet lifestyle. The good and bad food dichotomy as dictated by diet culture. With time, it spread these faulty thought patterns to every aspect of our life: exercise, work, career, relationship, how we raised children….

Perfectionism

Simply put: Everything must be perfect to off so we can be worthy of love, acceptance. At first with diet, food, and exercise but as failure cumulated, it becomes a way of life to prevent potential rejection due to “unperfected body”.

This cognitive distortion leads to a perfectionist fantasy. We make our current life so miserable by thinking that solving your problem (aka body size and appearance) will provide us with the happiness we are seeking that we actually never live (and enjoy) our current life.

Mental filtering: It’s my body’s fault

The body and its size take the blame for everything that’s wrong in your life. From health to a relationship, to opportunity, to emotional state… it’s all the body’s fault. Women then consistently compare themselves with others based on beauty and body size.

People-pleasing

This is when women move to external validation because internal validation is absent. As they believe that they are unacceptable, they will attempt to please and comfort everyone around them as a means of avoiding rejection and gaining acceptance.

These four most common cognitive distortions most present with women chronic dieters then strongly influence their eating patterns, ability to practice self-care, and create health-promoting habits.

The non-diet approach will first help the client and the patient with their mindset and emotions before engaging in nutrition education. In our diet mindset professional training, we teach the framework of self-coaching.

Self-Coaching for Intuitive Eating

Self-Coaching is a framework that supports first becoming aware of our thought, observing them without judgment and last to change our thinking. It’s also an effective approach supported by neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life.

We’ve developed a unique framework that supports the long-term goal of helping women recover from diet culture and become intuitive eater and body neutral. This is the best tool for diet mindset recovery for a professional approach.  Self-coaching for intuitive eating is applied in 3 steps:

Step 1: Self-observation

The process of self-coaching cultivates the first skill which is about being an observer of our inner world – our thoughts and our emotions. This process helps raise the level of interception that clients will need as they begin to explore their innate eating cues with intuitive eating.

Step 2: Non-judgement

Self-coaching is about exploring your inner world with a “lense of curiosity” instead of judgment. Asking the question “I wonder why I think like this or do this” instead “I’m so stupid because I do this” is empowering and creates deep mental clarity. You can then decide how you want to think about X or what you want to do about Y.

Step 3: Conscious response

The last step of self-coaching is about choosing conscious responses or thoughts that work best for you and your specific situation, problem, or challenge. Self-coaching is ultimately about deciding consciously instead of reacting unconsciously.

Self-coaching as a thought in an intuitive eating mentorship program is about teaching our clients to connect to their innate wisdom and their power. It leads to emotional intelligence by taking charge of your mind and emotions.

That’s the feminist approach to food and health.

Get Started with Diet Mindset Unlearning Professional Training

We have created for you a number of free non-diet professional training resources to help you begin your research in the field of non-diet approach to health. You will find non-diet online training, webinars, podcasts, and articles.

You can access the non-diet coaching professional training here:

Non-Diet Professional Mentorship

Our Non-Diet Coaching Certification is a high-level business mentorship program for health professionals who want to take their business to a non-diet model of care. This program includes diet mindset professional training.

A 6-month journey of business and personal growth exclusively designed for female health entrepreneurs mastering their own journey beyond the food with intuitive eating and body neutrality, while also learning to market their intuitive eating business with a heart so they can have a massive impact on women’s health.

The thought of starting an intuitive eating business can be scary and overwhelming.

Even for those that currently have a health business and want to transition to a non-diet business is frightening. Will I be able to sustain my income?

How can I make money off if I’m not selling meal plans, diet programs, detoxes, and cleanse?

If I’m not creating complex protocols for my clients: why would they pay me?

These are the type of questions this article aims to answer and many others.

What is the business of intuitive eating?

Being an Intuitive Eating Coach

Intuitive Eating Coaching Outcome

Serving versus Selling

Who do we serve in an intuitive eating business

First Step to start an intuitive eating business

Non-Diet Business coaching

What is a Non-Diet Mentorship program?

If you would like to listen to the article in audio format the Going Beyond The Food Show – Pro Series Season 1 Episode 2

Links mentioned on the episode

Mentorship Program

Intuitive Eating Guide

 Free Training & resources

Undiet Your Coaching Podcast

What’s an intuitive eating business?

An intuitive eating business is when you exchange money in order to support someone with intuitive eating. This support can come in many different ways:

• Teaching them an intuitive eating framework
• Coaching their learning or progress as an intuitive eater
• Supporting them in their intuitive eating journey
• Encouraging to move forward when they struggle
• Answering their questions
• Inspiring them to move forward in the face of adversity
• Creating products that will support people who want to become an intuitive eater

This business is not a formulated typical health business and does not hold the same value system considering that most health businesses are created to support diet culture ideology.

The most prevalent difference in a diet culture-free business resides in its approach to healing. An intuitive eating business is anchored in what I describe as a “bottom-up” approach versus a “top-down” approach. The goal is to empower you to become your own expert at your body. A typical health business that is rooted in diet culture is built around the provider being the expert and telling you how to engage with your body. Very disempowering.

An intuitive eating business is based on self-compassion, trust, respect of the individual innate body wisdom, and ability to heal themselves.

As of today, the most frequent intuitive eating business model is the coaching business model. You exchange money with your service as a coach.

Intuitive Eating Coach Business

As an intuitive eating coach, you are healing your client/ or patient… they heal themselves. Your clients/patients have all they need to heal their own relationship with food and body. For many, that’s a departure from their professional training… it’s ok to feel unsafe at first.

An intuitive eating coach is a health professional who guides clients/patients in their recovery from Diet Culture. Moreover, your job is to guide clients on the path of becoming an intuitive eater by listening to their concerns and helping them with problem-solving. Recognizing what we spoke about in the first episode of season 1 of Undiet Your Coaching Podcast, that the human relationship to food is by far more complex than just simple food choices.

Problem-solving with your client as an intuitive eating coach will not require you to provide a complex meal plan or macro ratio. Instead, helping them master their mindset particularly shifting away from diet mindset towards a compassionate mindset.

You will help your client move from an external cue to know what to eat, when to eat, and how to eat towards internal cues. As well as helping them feel their hunger, fullness and find satisfaction in what they eat. Instead of teaching your clients to suppress their cravings and how to “fill up on aid food”, you actually help them be in their body at the moment.

You help them understand that all food is good. That being healthy doesn’t mean being restrictive and feeling deprived. That they no longer need to earn their food. You empower your clients, give themselves permission to eat.

Intuitive Eating Coaching Outcome

Your goal is to coach your clients in building confidence in their own eating cues to be their own internal nutritionist. Instead of helping your client live a “normal life” in a very restrictive dietary protocol and how to make cauliflower brownie, you help your client give themselves permission to eat.

With compassion, you guide your client to cope with emotions differently. Helping them build resilience and emotional intelligence. Helping them learn to process their emotions without food.

As your clients build trust and respect with their innate body wisdom, you help them detach from being their bodies and their appearance. In addition, helping them reconnect to their innate worth as women. Guiding your client away from shame towards neutrality. Helping them embrace self-care beyond their physical bodies.

Finally, you help educate your client to a weight-neutral health approach guided by health at every size principle. Moving their body with joy and practicing gentle nutrition.

Being an effective intuitive eating coach requires you to be an intuitive eater first with a willingness to grow and learn from your clients. You must possess intuitive eating professional skills but also, mindset coaching skills, behaviour modification skills. Also, mindfulness and body image resilience skills.

Serving versus Selling

Let’s talk about what everyone thinks about but doesn’t want to talk about. It’s going to get uncomfortable for some…

It’s ok to be making money coaching intuitive eating, to exchange your coaching services for money. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be successful in your intuitive eating business. It’s ok to monetize your professional skills.

Ready for this one: The more revenue you create, the more money you make in your intuitive eating business means more people freed from diet culture. Yup, it truly is.

Now, how you monetize your services and create business revenue does matter. You can build a business in a masculine, patriarchal way or you can choose to embrace your female energy that empowers everyone even those who do not purchase from you.

You can serve instead of selling. Serving means engaging with our clients without expectation. You offer value by creating free content, teaching your audience the very basics of intuitive eating, providing free resources to everyone. You become a resource helping people break down their own barriers, fears, and supporting them with an empowering message. Guiding them to the next level resources available.

The opposite of serving is the hard sell, aggressive to close mentality that comes across as pushy and self- focused. When you are focus on selling, you create free resources guard to disempower people so they are led to believe that the only way for them or resolve their problem is by buying your product.

Serving is based on love. Selling is based on fear. Serving leads to selling without selling.

Who do we serve in an intuitive eating business

We must recognize that the intuitive eating model of nutrition is not accepted by the traditional model of healthcare. As a result, intuitive eating services are mostly never covered by traditional insurance providers. Our services are typically private care, meaning an out of the pocket expense.

This is why most intuitive eating professionals have to be entrepreneurs alongside their profession. You can provide service for someone else’s business but in most cases, you will need to be running your own business.

This means that you need to embrace entrepreneurship and learn about setting up and maintaining a business, marketing your intuitive eating business as well as getting and retaining clients.

Let’s make something clear here: a professional health certification isn’t how you will learn to run a business. The vast majority of health certifications do not include business training and if they do, it’s not focused on a non-diet business model but instead a model that supports diet culture.

That’s why I created the  Non-Diet Coaching Certification program. If we want to be successful in dismantling diet culture, I need you to know how to successfully operate a business.

First Step to start an intuitive eating business

The first place to start is with a business strategy. That’s you creating a brand-new business of transitioning your current business to an intuitive eating business model, you need a business strategy.

The strategy is what will turn your passion into biz and blow you to impact thousands of women. It’s the roadmap you will look up to as you work day-to-day in your business. Your business strategy consists of the following:

• Why
• What
• Who
• Where
• When and the…
• How much

The first layer of your business strategy that we teach is the why… not the what. This is where most business strategies go wrong. The business you create needs to be in alignment with your personal values, your personal goals, and how YOU want to lead your personal life.

To be an effective heart-centred intuitive eating business owner, you must care for yourself first. Make sure your business supports YOU not the opposite.

Non-Diet Business Coaching

Today, I own and operate a very successful intuitive eating business. It’s not always been like this. In this first episode of the PRO Series podcast, I share the story of my own professional and business evolution.

It took time and resources for me to get where I’m today. For over 4 years, I searched and trained in various professional training programs to create the Going Beyond The Food Method. I shared more on this in this podcast episode.

Although I had 15 years of retail business operation experience, I also had to learn the health business model. I had to educate myself, get coached in my blind spot, be mentored. Over the last 10 years, I invested approximately $60,000 in my business.

• I hired an experienced nutrition business coach before even graduating -8K
• The year following my graduation, I committed my first health business mastermind -10K
• 4 years ago, I hired an online business coach to help me transition my business online – 10K
• Over the next years, I have purchased 26k in online business skills courses to learn email marketing, funnel, summit, branding, etc…

Non-Diet Coaching Certification  Program

The Going Beyond The Food non-diet coaching certification program is a space where you can receive support guidance to become the best intuitive eating professional. It’s a program geared to refine your professional skills set and teach you the skills you need to build a successful business that can impact thousands of women.

It helps you develop as a powerful leader and help other women come back to their power. You learn how to harness your ability to support and help other women. As a result, you can impact thousands of other women and dismantle diet culture.

I believe that the only way for us to be able to end diet culture oppression of women is by us women coming together and helping each other as women back into our power via intuitive eating and body neutrality. This is a woman issue…that must be resolved by women.

As women, we need to step up and change the future for the young generation of girls. We need to teach them that they aren’t defined by their bodies, we need to crush DC so it never gets its dirty hands on the upcoming generation.

The liberation of the upcoming generation will only come through our generation’s liberation from diet culture and patriarchy.

Currently, the traditional model of nutrition, coaching, and even health care is not set-up for this…it’s entrenched in diet culture. Most of the wellness industry is deeply entrenched in diet culture. The alternative health industry claims to be about the root cause… but never looked at the reason why women engage with food and body.

Bottom line we need a new approach

We need women who can help other women change their relationship to food and body, empowering women to become their own experts at their bodies, to help women build confidence in themselves and their power to know what’s right for them.

Women who will support other women. We need emphatic, compassionate women who have the skills to connect with other women and a passion for change.

My job is to ensure these women are doing their job so well while creating a sustainable business so they can keep impacting more women for years to come. Furthermore, my job is to ensure that these women are successful so they crush diet culture for the generations to come.

Ready to get started building an Intuitive Eating Business?

You can access all of our services on our work with us page.  We have a number of programs and service levels enabling us to serve :

Non-Diet Coaching Certification for professionals ready to integrate the Going Beyond The Food Method™️ in their practice and for women wanting to become  Certified Coach and build a business coaching other women beyond the food.

Good Money Business Mastermind  A business mentorship and a collective of ambitious, driven and empowered anti-diet culture providers and coaches on a mission to dismantle diet culture and make GOOD money doing it! 

Free Resources and Masterclasses: Get started and get to know us better!

I help women with intuitive eating mentorship programs today but it wasn’t always so…

8 years ago, I was 2 years into my nutrition practice, Carolyn walked into my office. And she had just been diagnosed with high blood pressure and high cholesterol. She desired to be “healthier”.

I proceeded to take a diligent intake. And this intake process included a food journal, detailed health history as well as a symptomology assessment. Based on my assessment I concluded that a “whole food diet” would support her goals.  Along with other lifestyle modifications.

Not only how I was teaching nutrition different but also my approach. So Carolyn would add foods to her plate instead of removing foods. Carolyn left my clinic with her food list, food journal and “ideal plate” handout in hands.

Then two weeks later she was back for a follow-up. Within 10 minutes, she was in tears.

“I’m so sorry Stephanie I wasn’t able to follow what you told me to do and thought this time would be different. My urges to binge on processed food at night are back in full force. “

“I ate my kids’ food in secret.  What is wrong is wrong with me??”

Are we causing harm to our clients?

Shifting to a non-diet approach to health

The Going Beyond The Food Method™️

Intuitive Eating Mentorship

Non-Diet Professional Training

Non-Diet Business Coaching

How to Get Started

If you would like to listen to the article in audio format the Going Beyond The Food Show – Pro Series Season 1 Episode 1

Links mentioned on the episode

PRO Series – Free Training & resources

Non-Diet Coaching Certification

Intuitive Eating Guide

Are we causing harm to our clients?

We do not know what we do not know.

I was aggravating an underlying condition for Caroline.  Not only did Carolyn had a disordered relationship with food but also with her body image due to years of chronic dieting. And all of my assessment tools and training never accounted for this condition. I was neither taught to assess how patient-related to food or to consider past dieting behavior in my assessment.

Fast forward 8 years later. When I reflected back on my first few years of practice not only most of my female clients were in fact in a disordered relationship with food but I also was.

Most nutrition experts engage in disordered eating

In 2012, an international study in 14 countries found a whopping 77 percent of nutrition students felt that eating disorders were a concern among their peers. And the reasons behind this are complicated: theories run from an obsessive overexposure to information about food and exercise, to pressure within degrees to be an “ideal nutritionist.”

Individuals that develop disordered eating may at first initiate a quest for a healthier lifestyle but then dysfunctional, compulsive beliefs about food emerge that then impair health, work, and social functioning.

If you are curious to know if have a disordered relationship to food then you should complete our free professional Non-Diet Coaching intake forms. Assess yourself and share your results with us!

Shifting to a non-diet approach to health

Carolyn was the most impactful client-practitioner I have had to this day.

Not only did she triggered in me a must needed professional shift but also a personal transformation. So my quest for another way of serving my client and healing myself began with her.

7 years ago when I searched for support, training and non-diet coaching certification nothing existed. Instead, I read the Health At Avery Size® research and book by Dr. Lindo Bacon.  And then began applying a weight-neutral approach to health in my practice.

Over the next 4 years, I collected both a variety of professional and personal skills. This collection of tools is today known as The Going Beyond The Food Method™️. And this non-diet methodology is currently taught in Undiet Your Life Coaching Program

The Going Beyond The Food Method™

The Going Beyond The Food Method™️ is a way of working with clients and patients which removes that emphasis and pressure to eat for weight loss or health. Instead, it embraces the Health At Every Size® weight-neutral approach to health, intuitive eating, body neutrality, mindfulness, and a self-coaching mindset.

This non-diet methodology respects the fact that each human has innate body wisdom. And that our the body knows what we need and what is best for us including food, eating, movement, weight, and self-care.

A practitioner who uses our methodology is focused on helping women rebuild a relationship of trust, respect, and neutrality with their bodies.The client is empowered to identify what will be best for her to optimize their own health and wellbeing.

At the core, a holistic based approach recognizing the 4 human bodies: mental, emotional, spiritual and physical human bodies. This non-diet approach for health coaches, nutritionists or any other health experts is a gentle process. And it focuses on skills building.

Ultimately, it’s about helping women conquer back their power and thrive unconditionally!

Intuitive Eating Mentorship

The Going Beyond The Food Mentorship program is an intuitive eating mentorship program, an anti-diet training and body image professional training. And it’s designed to support health professionals desiring to shift their practice to a non-diet model.

This is what I was seeking but couldn’t find years ago.

As a professional, a non-diet approach to health and nutrition can be scary as it empowers your client and patient to be their own health expert.

Non-Diet Coaching Professional Training

“If we are not going to hand out meal plans and “good and bad” food list, what will we do?”

That is a very common question and also a great starting point to understand which professional skills set will be required in a non-diet approach.

Food choices and healthy habits aren’t only derived from intellectual knowledge but also from our emotions and thoughts. This applied not only to healthy habits but to every habit we choose to do as a human.

As a non-diet practitioner, you will need to help with your clients with the mindset and emotional intelligence tools. We teach self-coaching for intuitive eating.

Chronic dieters and women who dislike their bodies are in their head instead of their bodies. You will need to help them come back into their body and to connect to their bodily sensation including their eating cues. Mindfulness is the perfect tool to cultivate body attunement.

Intuitive Eating Training

Intuitive eating is a well- researched and complete framework to help you reframe the before, during and after relationship to food with women. As a certified Intuitive eating counselor, I have studied directly with Evelyn Tribole and now included this empowering framework with all my clients in our non-diet online training.

As a non-diet professional, your skills wouldn’t be complete without a tool you can use to help your clients to heal their relationship with their body image.

Body Neutrality is the framework I have selected to teach in our program. It helps women understand that we aren’t defined by own physical bodies. This body image professional training goal is to respect and accept your body for what it is – and that’s it.

Non-Diet Business Coaching

Shifting your business to an anti-diet business model requires some small business adjustment mainly in the content of your professional services, health programs, and marketing.

Your intuitive eating business skills will require you to move to a serving message from selling messages. Your future client or patient will need to be educated about what is a non-diet and weight-neutral approach to health.

The 5-step process to build a successful Anti-Diet Business

1. Determine the non-diet business format that will support your personal goals

2. Define & refine your ideal clients and their needs

3. Create a non-diet service offer.

4. Market your offer or product using our exclusive non-diet transformation funnel system.

5. Deliver your product.

Bonus – Scale & Diversify

How to Get Started

We have created for you a number of free intuitive eating mentorship training resources to help you begin your research in the field of non-diet approach to health.

You can access this non-diet professional training by clicking here.

You will find non-diet online training, webinars, podcasts, and articles.

One last thing

Here’s the truth: As long as you teach any labelled diet (Keto, paleo, GF, DF, ….) and or handout food list and meal plan, you aren’t teaching sustainable health or nutrition. Point.

If the above is you, just about now you’re likely pissed at me. That’s ok sister! I get it. I was on the receiving end of this exact discourse about 4 years ago and I was mad but it planted a seed in my mind… and here I’m today!

It’s not your fault. As far as I know, today…no nutrition school or health coaching program currently offers Intuitive eating as part of their curriculum. So how were you supposed to know??

But now you know…. So, what will you do? Continue to arm people teaching diets or learn intuitive eating for yourself and slowly, gradually integrate it in your practice and help your client real sustainable changes.

It’s your choice. If you choose to opt-out of diet culture, we can help you in your journey.

We do not know what we do not know.

Most nutrition experts engage in disordered eating.

Individuals that develop disordered eating may at first initiate a quest for a healthier lifestyle but then dysfunctional, compulsive beliefs about food emerge that then impair health, work, and social functioning. If you are curious to know if have a disordered relationship to food then you should complete our free professional intuitive eating intake forms. Assess yourself and share your results with us!

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7 years ago when I searched for support, training and non-diet professional mentorship nothing existed. Instead, I read the Health At Avery Size® research and book by Dr. Lindo Bacon.  And then began applying a weight-neutral approach to health in my practice.

Over the next 4 years, I collected both a variety of professional and personal skills. This collection of tools is today known as The Going Beyond The Food Method™️. And this non-diet methodology is currently taught in Going Beyond The Food Academy.

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It is a way of working with clients and patients which removes that emphasis and pressure to eat for weight loss or health.

Embraces the Health At Every Size® weight-neutral approach to health, intuitive eating, body neutrality, mindfulness, and a self-coaching mindset.

This non-diet methodology respects the fact that each human has innate body wisdom. And that our the body knows what we need and what is best for us including food, eating, movement, weight, and self-care.

At the core, a holistic based approach recognizing the 4 human bodies: mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical human bodies.

Ultimately, it’s about helping women conquer back their power and thrive unconditionally!

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“If we are not going to hand out meal plans and “good and bad” food list, what will we do?”

That is a very common question and also a great starting point to understand which professional skills set will be required in a non-diet approach.

As a non-diet practitioner, you will need to help with your clients with the mindset and emotional intelligence tools. We teach self-coaching for intuitive eating.

” image-4=”” headline-5=”h2″ question-5=”Non-diet Business Coaching” answer-5=”

Shifting your business to an anti-diet business model requires some small business adjustment mainly in the content of your professional services, health programs, and marketing.

Your intuitive eating business skills will require you to move to a serving message from selling messages. Your future client or patient will need to be educated about what is a non-diet and weight-neutral approach to health.

” image-5=”” headline-6=”h2″ question-6=”How to get started?” answer-6=”

We have created for you a number of free intuitive eating mentorship training resources to help you begin your research in the field of non-diet approach to health.

Visit our Non-Diet Professional Training page and you will find non-diet online training, webinars, podcasts, and articles.

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