How do you make peace with your food and with your body? Clinical nutritionist and founder of Going Beyond the Food Academy, Stephanie Dodier speaks about the connection between emotional eating and our desires behind wanting to lose weight, and how we can end the diet cycle and have a more positive body image. You can find all the info and links about this episode at https://holisticwellness.ca/episode39. Topics Discussed in this Episode: Stephanie’s health journey What it means to ‘go beyond the food’ The ‘food obsessed’ paradigm Why some women struggle with self-respect and self-care The diet culture Body positivity and body neutrality The 4-step process to overcoming emotional eating, food craving, and binging The ‘all-or-nothing’ trap and how to avoid it   Key Takeaways: Part of the job that food does is address the emotional component of eating. The question is, how are you using it? Are you using food to numb, to avoid, or to feel better? Do you use it to emphasize good emotions or do you just eat when you’re hungry? The healing mechanism of going beyond the food is around mindfulness and really being present with your emotions and not fearing your emotions. To engage in self-respect and self-care, we must first have a relationship of love and appreciation towards ourselves. About 2% of what society pushes forward as what your body should look like is only 2% of the world. Self-discovery is a threatening aspect to our current society’s model because when you know who you are, you no longer to try to fit the mold. You no longer seek external recognition because you have it within you. Body positivity is about accepting all body types in all forms and color, and about bringing that body forward to change the standard of society. Body neutrality is self-acceptance and self-compassion about your body. It’s understanding who you are and having a relationship with who you are from a place of accepting your body for what it is.   Action Steps: Take this quiz and find out your food freedom score. This is one way that you can detect if you have a behavior around food that is maybe too emotional or numbing. Don’t avoid pain. Let yourself go through it, and you’ll find out that it’s actually not that bad. We often make it up to be much worse than it actually is. Ask yourself: How much of your current struggle with food is due to body image? And start working your way towards body positivity and body neutrality. The 4-step process to overcoming emotional eating, food craving, and binging: Think of your food urges and set them up into two categories: Am I physically hungry or am I emotionally hungry? If you’re physically hungry, go eat. But if you’re having the urge to eat because of emotional reasons, then step away from food. Engage in a breathing exercise or the so-called ‘crave cure formula’: Close your eyes and start breathing through your nose until you’re more relaxed and into yourself. Once you’re in that calm space, start scanning your body inside your head and try to understand which emotion is inside of you and where it’s coming from.   Stephanie said: “Going beyond the food is about understanding your relationship to food and how food serves you beyond nutrition. That doesn’t mean that nutrition does not have a place. Food is healing… but it also serves an emotional component.” “There’s a movement called ‘body positivity’ that is starting to push the expectation of society against what our body should look like. But for all of us… we have to do the work internally in ourselves to get there and not wait for society’s standard to change.”   Thanks for listening!   Important Announcements: I have opened my calendar to offer some complementary calls for the month of December, as well as my other coach, Valerie. So if you’re thinking about working with us one-on-one and you really want to get further support, whether that’s with your weight or your hormones, or you’re interested in maybe diving into our 12-week Met