What Intuitive Eating is And What it Gets Wrong

Let's break down the basics first, shall we?

What is Intuitive Eating?

IE is a non diet, weight inclusive, and researched backed self care eating framework that revolves around 10 principles. The principles work by either cultivating or removing obstacles to body awareness. It recognizes that a person's relationship to food is just as important- if not more- than what a person actually eats.

Intuitive Eating honors your health by teaching you how to learn and respond to your own body’s cues- instead of the outside noise from the diet and wellness industry.

Where did IE even come from?

The year was 1995 (although the idea of eating intuitively as a concept started around 1970)...

Dieticians Evelyn Tribole, MS, RDN, CEDERD-S and Elyse Resch, MS, RDS, CEDS-S were both working as nutritionists, helping clients to lose weight.  After several years in the business, they began noticing how all the weight loss methods they were using weren’t working.  And that the...

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Before you buy that supplement...

For many years, I bought all the green powders, drank pre-workout, used all the collagen peptides, tried all the adaptogenic teas- and spent a ridiculous amount of money every month on ‘optimizing my health’…

While also spending lots of mental energy on refining my food intake to ‘healthy’ foods only.

And in all that time, I did not feel more energized, or avoided illnesses, or lifted my max weight.

I just felt consumed by my pursuit of ‘enhancing’ my life.

When I let go of trying to regulate my body through food and movement, I also let go of trying to regulate my health with supplementation from an unregulated industry.

And in turn, I dialed into these things- and not only felt better and stronger, but got more of my time and energy back from all that I put into making myself ‘better’.

Take whatever supplements you want and need, but I humbly suggest trying these four things first; it might save you some energy- and a ton of...

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Animal Flow: what you need to know.

Certain movements don’t get enough credit when it comes to strength gains.

The big moves- like squats and deadlifts- are stars for a reason; they’re fundamental patterns that create full body strength.

But you know what helps with ALL those movements?  Ground based movements like the ones in Animal Flow…let’s discuss.

What is Animal Flow?

 It’s a system of movement- created by long time certified personal trainer Mike Fitch- that uses bodyweight ground based movements used in yoga, calisthenics, and gymnastics.  Although the moves themselves aren’t always unique, the system is; each movement is given an animal name that resembles its movements.  This makes them easier to remember, and allows for easier programming when used in a flow.

 

It’s broken down further into six components that each serve a particular purpose:

 

  1. Wrist Mobilization exercises to prepare hands and wrists for all the ground work ahead.
  2. ...
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How to pick the right size Kettlebell.

If you’re ready to start training with kettlebells, but don’t know where to start, There are a ton of general guidelines and suggestions out there to guide you.  For me, there are three things that are more important than others when choosing the right KB size for you. 

In this article,I’m going to break down those 3 concerns down. 

And I’ll discuss my thoughts on choosing the type of kettlebell that is most comfortable for you.

 Let’s get right to it; keep these suggestions below in mind when reading the weight recommendation range chart at the end of the article.

Top Three Kettlebell buying considerations.

 

What's your T level? 

There are muscle mass differences in humans with more testosterone than those with less that will dictate a difference in starting weight. 

 When you see weight recommendations for men, it’s reflective of those higher testosterone levels which create more muscle mass. ...

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Top Three Training Mistakes When Training With Kettlebells

You got yourself some kettlebells and are READY to use em!  But…you’ve watched so many videos and read so many different things about how to use them, you’ve got analysis paralysis.

OR…

You’ve been using them for a while- like you would dumbbells- and you’re not really sure if you're doing it right, or what else you can do with them.

No matter what your exposure is to bells, here are the three most common mistakes that people with all levels of experience make.

Not understanding the purpose of the exercise (which in KB’s, most often looks like using arms instead of your backside).

From first glance, kettlebell swings and cleans look like a great arm exercise, don’t they?  Swings could be seen as a front raise. And cleans?  Seems like great bicep and shoulder work. 

And yes, your arms are being used in both these moves- but they aren’t the driving force for moving the bell.

Both these exercises are Ballistic...

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The problematic story of how weight become associated with health.

To find out how we got here, we've got to go into the past...

Larger bodies were deemed 'uncivilized' long before the medical and scientific communities began to label them as a health risk.

The correlation of weight and health started with the growth of the slave trade, European philosophers began cataloging physical traits they saw in different societies.  In an attempt to create some sort of 'evolutionary hierarchy', they labeled fatness as a marker for 'savagery' because it appeared more often in people of color, while thinness appeared more often in white people, men, and aristocrats.  Thus began the racist, classist, and sexist roots of weight stigma

Doctors, up until early 19th century, had seen weight gain as a natural process of aging.  But feeling increasing pressure from their patients who decided they needed to lose weight, and an emerging insurance business that started the use of the BMI scale (created by an ASTRONOMER almost 200 years ago) to...

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What does a non diet fitness trainer actually do?

In the early days of my training career, I sold body dreams. 

I truly believed that I was helping people live a healthier life, that losing weight was the answer.

Because that’s what I was taught as a new trainer- a new trainer who had long recovered from both anorexia and bulimia, but was in the throes of living a ‘clean’ lifestyle.

Because surely that’s what it means to be healthy, right?

Fast forward many years later- and tons of psychological therapy, experiences coaching hundreds of human bodies, and an un-education in fitness- and I now know how to support humans in their health.

Through all this, I can admit what other trainers won’t, because they are either in a disordered relationship with their own food and fitness, they’re happy making money off your 'failures', or they haven't educated themselves on the methods they sell; diets don’t work, weight loss isn’t health, and there’s a LOT of misinformation when it...

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Kettlebells: How we got here, why we use them.

The history of kettlebells is mostly told like this…

Much of the conversation around when kettlebells came into play begins around the start of the 18th century in Russia, when the word for it- ‘Giya’- was first published in the Russian dictionary.  Back then, KB’s were used as counterweights on market scales, until someone decided that throwing them around might be good entertainment.  This is thought to be the beginning of using kettlebells for weight training.

The story continues to the late 1800’s, naming Russian physician Vladislav Kraevsky as the country’s founding father of  kettlebell usage for olympic weightlifting.

But the truth is, there’s evidence of Kettlebells being around earlier, and in other countries…

Check out this enlightening article that talks about Elise Serafin Luftmann, one of the earliest strongwoman  known in history, from a German speaking region of Bohemia in 1830.

Kettlebells have...

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The harm that comes with praising weight loss.

Let's say someone in your family is working really hard to develop healthy habits.  They've started exercising, they've been adding more vegetables to their diet, they've created more boundaries in their lives to support their mental health.

And they've lost weight.

Whether that weight loss was intentional- or a product of less stress, moving more, less calorie intake- here's what we've known about weight loss.

Here's one weight loss study of MANY  that show that the long term success rate of weight loss is low.  2 years later many will regain, 5 years most will regain all if not more than what they weighed in the beginning.

Even if you've never gone through a 'weight loss transformation' yourself, I bet you can imagine how awful it would feel to get praise and validation on your health journey in terms of how your body looks, only to regain that weight back down the line.

In addition, you never really know how someone lost that weight- no matter what they decide...

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What's the point of Kettlebell Suitcase Marches?

 

Think about what happens when you carry something heavy- like a grocery bag- in one hand while you walk...

Specifically, what happens with your position in space, and what's happening with your grip.

You're immediately off balance.  And whether you notice it or not, your center of gravity- your core- has to fire up to keep you from falling over.

And your grip?  The tension you create carries up from your forearm to your bicep to your shoulder to your upper back muscles (see THIS post on muscle irradiation).

Carrying across a room- or marching in place- with weight on one side of your body is so much more than it appears, and one of the best functional exercises out there.

How to do this move: 

Holding a KB in one hand and arm hanging, stand tall with shoulders back, down, and squared off. With core engaged, begin marching, using your abdominals to bring knees up close to 90 degrees. Maintain balance.

Slowing down your pace and bringing your knee up, using your...

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