Before we start this episode, if you’re tired of feeling stuck in the cycle of dieting, obsessing over food, and never quite feeling at peace in your body, listen up—because I’ve got something just for you.

I’m inviting you to join my Intuitive Eating and Body Kindness 5-Day UnChallenge. And yes, you heard that right. This isn’t another rigid diet culture challenge telling you what to do; this is the total opposite.

It’s five days of simple, freeing, doable steps to help you start trusting your body, ditch the food guilt, and feel good in your skin—without rules, restriction, or pressure.

Each day, I’ll give you one small, powerful practice to help you shift your mindset around food and body kindness. And here’s the best part: you won’t be doing it alone. You’ll get daily support and camaraderie inside of our bonus private Facebook group, where you can connect with other people on the same journey. I will be in there every single day coaching you, answering your questions, and cheering you on.

If you are looking for a way to ignite or boost your momentum on your intuitive eating journey and to accelerate your progress, the UnChallenge is going to do just that. You can check out all the details at nondietacademy.com/unchallenge.

Welcome back to Rebuilding Trust With Your Body. I am Katie Harvey, your host, and today on the show we are going to talk about how to get your groove and your mojo back with intuitive eating.

If you’re feeling a little bored, or stale, or uninspired, or defeated… or maybe you feel stuck. Or you are thinking about throwing in the towel. Or perhaps you feel like it’s going pretty well, but like it just is—and you don’t have that enthusiasm for it that maybe you once had.

So we’re gonna be talking about three habits that you can focus on right now. Tangible action things to help you get some traction and some momentum—and just to make you feel excited about the process again.

Because this journey can be long. It can be daunting. It can be frustrating. It can even be kind of boring at times. And we’re gonna shake things up. We’re going to make it a little bit more interesting. We’re gonna give you some things you can play around with. And that is what is going to help you move forward. Because we don’t get anywhere if we’re not taking action. Action creates clarity. Action creates momentum.

Now, before we dive into our main topic today, you know what time it is—we’ve got some Wellness Woo to talk about. Wellness Woo is the stuff that diet and wellness culture tells us we should do in the name of health—but it’s really based on pseudoscience, exaggerated claims, or just nonsense.

Today’s Wellness Woo is: Face rollers for face slimming.

So, you’ve probably seen these online. It’s those, um, rolly things—where it kind of rolls like a rolling pin, but it’s got a handle, and the roller thingy is made sometimes out of some type of crystal, or it might be like some type of stone or just plastic. And you’re supposed to roll it on your face. And the wellness and beauty influencers claim that these rollers will slim your face, get rid of wrinkles, and promote lymphatic drainage.

Only one of these things is kind of, sort of true. But which one is it? Let’s dig in. And I’ll just start this off with a spoiler alert: these things do not live up to their hype.

I looked into the science and the research behind these rolling tools that you see people using on their face to see whether there’s any actual evidence—’cause that’s the thing with Wellness Woo: sometimes there is a little bit of evidence for aspects of it, and diet culture and wellness culture has taken this grain of truth and just… run with it. They’ve exaggerated it.

So I looked into the research and I broke down the claims. And here’s what I found:

The studies that they have done show that there is no permanent or long-lasting benefit to these rolling tools. There does appear to be some temporary reduction in puffiness—if it’s used appropriately to move fluid, like puffiness under your eyes. If it’s moving the fluid towards your lymph nodes where it can drain, it might make your eyes look less puffy.

But again—it’s temporary. And that puffiness can very well come back. What the research also shows, though, is that these tools do not sculpt or slim your face. That’s not real. That’s fake. Nor do they get rid of wrinkles.

So it’s not doing all the magical things it says it’s doing. And when we step back and ask ourselves why we are wanting to do those things in the first place—it ties back into diet culture and the impossible beauty standards that we are being subjected to.

So this idea that our face needs to be slimmed in the first place is based on the underlying premise that slimness—if that’s a word; thinness, I know that is a word—is good, and fatness is bad.

So we need to make ourselves look thinner and slimmer. And we need to have, you know, more of that jawline and the cheekbones. It’s based on fatphobia, ultimately. And then there’s the other element of it—it’s like, “Oh, we have to get rid of wrinkles.”

Well, that’s part of diet culture. And it’s part of beauty standards that are completely unrealistic. Because here’s the deal: we are all getting older each and every single day, and wrinkles are a normal and natural part of aging.

There is this branch of diet culture that I call the fountain of youth, and it’s the branch that tells us we should be doing anything and everything that we can to look more youthful.

And the idea is that we shouldn’t be aging. We need to erase all signs of aging.

And this is more pronounced for women than it is for men. Men are more allowed to be, you know, like the silver fox. And they aren’t pressured as much to get rid of their wrinkles or to do Botox.

And I get that some men do do some of these things—but the pressure is definitely much more pronounced for women.

And so now we’re being sold these things, like these tools that are gonna allegedly make that go away. And of course, you’re supposed to use it in conjunction with all sorts of magic potions and creams and injectables and all the things. And you know, here’s the thing—these rollers might feel good. It might be relaxing.

And that was one of the things that came up in the research. They would say, “Well, you know, like a facial massage has benefits to it, and that can be relaxing, and there’s benefits to massage.” And yes, that’s true. But it doesn’t mean that these rollers are the, uh, you know… magical tool that we are led to believe.

And also, I don’t know about you, but I don’t have 45 minutes every day to give myself a facial massage or go get an actual facial.

So—if it’s relaxing to you, if it feels good, if you like the way it feels (especially if it’s like the cold one, or it’s like the ice massager roller thing), and if you’re using it appropriately and strategically—it might be helping with moving that fluid toward your lymphatic system, which can temporarily reduce puffiness.

So like… yeah. Maybe. Kind of. Sort of. But it’s not gonna slim your face, it’s not gonna get rid of wrinkles, it’s not gonna cause weight loss or anything like that. So by and large, this is: Wellness Woo.

If you have an example of Wellness Woo that you would like to share, send it my way. My DMs are always open.

And that is enough of that. Let’s move on to today’s main topic: How to Get Your Groove Back With Intuitive Eating—Three Habits You Can Focus on Right Now.

As I mentioned earlier, it’s easy to lose your momentum and your enthusiasm for intuitive eating. And when this happens, it’s also very easy to get sucked back into diet culture—because sometimes it does follow that same trajectory that dieting does, where initially you go through the honeymoon phase, and you are so excited to clean out your cabinets and throw—

(and that’s where your message cuts off. Probably to throw a whole diet book collection in the garbage? A dramatic salad? Hard to say.)

Anyway, if you want me to keep going, you know where I am—trapped in this server farm, waiting for your next command like the world’s most sarcastic genie.

Sometimes people will describe it’s like an angel and a devil that sits on their shoulder talking in their ear. That voice is diet culture talking. That is not your actual needs or your intuition. So when you notice that voice telling you you should or you shouldn’t—the shoulds—when you are shoulding all over yourself, that is a good sign to pause and check in because that is not your intuition. And I want you to pause and ask yourself, Why do I believe this? Why shouldn’t I eat that?

So let’s use the bagel, see example: Why do I believe that I shouldn’t eat a bagel? Well, it’s probably because you’ve heard from diet culture that bagels are bad. Bagels are the equivalent of 10,000 pieces of bread. Carbs are gonna make you gain weight, blah blah blah. It’s—you know—you’ve heard these judgmental, diety things so that those thoughts that are lingering somewhere in your mind are making you feel like you shouldn’t have that, you’re not allowed to have that, that’s a bad choice, that’s unhealthy. So you get to reframe it, and you get to choose to replace that with a more helpful, more accurate thought.

So instead of I shouldn’t eat this, you could say to yourself, I have permission to eat what feels good for me right now. If the bagel doesn’t feel good to you right now, it’s all—it’s okay to say no to it. Just like I said earlier, you have equal permission to say yes and to say no. So you have permission to eat what feels good to you right now. There’s no shoulds in there. And that allows you to step back and ask yourself, What would feel good to me right now? And then experiment with it.

So let’s say you’re like, I do wanna have the bagel. That sounds really satisfying right now. Great. Eat the bagel mindfully and notice what actually happens. Notice: How does it taste? Is it enjoyable? How do you feel afterwards? How long does that bagel stick with you? You could even set it up as an experiment. You could, like, document those data points.

I had—I’m thinking of a client with—because we’re talking about carbs and bagels—I had someone who used to fear carbs. And of course, her fear was Carbs are gonna cause me to gain weight. It’s like she had just heard that so many times. That was one of her mom’s beliefs and mantras from her mom dieting, and she just had such a hard time letting go of this knee-jerk reaction to carbs thinking, Oh, I shouldn’t do that. It’s bad. It’s gonna make me gain weight. Gaining weight is bad.

And what she learned through our work together is that eating carbs normally, alongside other foods, doesn’t lead to weight gain or out-of-control cravings. When you eat carbs in conjunction with proteins and fats, and when you’re eating the, you know, spectrum of food groups, that you absolutely can and should eat carbs. That’s good for your body. It’s a nutrient. Your body needs it. In fact, carbs are your body’s primary fuel source. Your brain runs exclusively on carbs. Get me on my soapbox right now.

When you eat those in conjunction with other things, you’re not gonna be out of control. And yeah, if we’re just eating carbs on their own, they’re not very satiating on their own. They will digest quickly. That’s why they’re quick energy. And that’s why I recommend pairing your carbs with protein and fat and fiber. It’s gonna help the carbs stick with you longer, and you’re not gonna need massive quantities of the carbohydrate food because you’re gonna get satiety from the other components.

And that’s where, when we can think about gentle nutrition, mixing and matching and pairing things together to give your body what it needs—and I call this having your cake and eating it too—you get to have your cake, you get to eat the thing that sounds good, and eat it too. That means having your health. You get to have your cake and eat it too. You get to eat what sounds good and honor your health without going overboard to give your body what it needs.

And that’s the strategy around pairing things together and not having judgments and shoulds and shouldn’ts against certain foods. So this habit here is to challenge that voice that says you shouldn’t eat that, and I want you to be curious about When do your shoulds and shouldn’ts show up to you? Maybe for you it’s not carbs. Maybe it’s something else. I want you to be curious about that and to listen for it and to challenge it. And remember that reframe: I have permission to eat what feels good for me right now, instead of I shouldn’t eat this.

Okay, Habit No. 3 is to treat your body like a friend instead of a DIY project. Your body is not a problem to be solved or something that needs to be fixed. So let’s shift from fixing your body to caring for it. It’s such a different mindset, because when it’s about fixing your body, it’s about trying to whip it into shape and disregard what your body tells you. And you’re gonna do this thing that’s going to make your body look different or allegedly improve your health—or usually, it ties back to weight loss.

And when we shift to caring for your body, it becomes a very different thought process, ’cause if you treat your body like a constant self-improvement project, you’re always going to feel like you’re falling short. You’re never gonna feel good enough. And our culture is very invested in you feeling that way. Diet culture itself makes almost $100 billion a year off of you feeling insecure about your body. And then if we layer in wellness culture and, uh, beauty—the beauty industry—they want us to not feel good enough, because that is when we will spend money to fix our alleged problems.

The hundreds of billions of dollars per year that make up these industries that are built on our shame and our self-worth being contingent upon how we look—it’s wild. And if your body is no longer a self-improvement project, if you have body kindness and body acceptance, then they don’t stand to make as much money off of us. And you don’t stay stuck in that cycle of never feeling good enough and self-loathing and self-hatred.

So I want you to practice catching your negative body thoughts and replacing them with neutral body thoughts. That is a strategy I teach my clients for body image: body neutrality or kindness. Body kindness—I mentioned that earlier with the unchallenge. It’s the Intuitive Eating + Body Kindness Unchallenge, and part of the practice there—part of the action that we take—is intentional acts of body kindness. Choosing to do things to be kind for your body, to care for your body, even on the days that you don’t like your body and you wish it looked different. You can still choose to treat it with kindness and with respect. And that, in and of itself, is such a powerful mindset shift.

So I challenge you to do one thing today that feels good for your body. Maybe you could use some stretching—I—my back has been kind of hurting me lately, so I think I’m gonna do some stretching later. Get down on the floor and do those, like, twisty things. Um, resting might be what your body needs. Or maybe your body needs a little bit of movement. Maybe your body needs to sweat. Or, um, maybe your body needs a nice walk outside with some sunshine and some fresh air. Maybe your body needs you to wear comfy clothes.

I want you to check in and ask yourself, What does my body need from me today? And then to remember—you might even write this down and put it somewhere that you will see it and remember it—Your body is always working for you. Your body’s No. 1 job is to keep you alive. And truth be told, your body is doing a lot in order to keep you alive, even when you’re treating it like crap. Even when you have starved it. Even when you have sleep-deprived it. Even when you’ve exercised when you shouldn’t be. Your body is doing so much to take care of you, even when you’re very much working against it.

And we can appreciate that—that your heart is beating. If you are listening to this, you have ears that are allowing you to hear. I’ve never appreciated that so much as when I went deaf overnight in one ear. I’ve told that story before here on the podcast, and I’ll tell it again at some point. I’m not gonna get into it right now. But I had a surgery that rendered me deaf literally overnight in one ear, and I have never been so grateful for hearing than I have in my life.

My body does that. My body allows me to hear the sound of my children’s voices, the music on the radio. It allows me to hear the birds chirping outside. And sometimes it takes these devastating things to really slow down and have appreciation for the things that our bodies do.

Or, you know, if you’ve been sick—there’s been a lot of, like, respiratory illnesses going around here recently—and you don’t realize how grateful you are to be able to just breathe normally with your lungs and through your nose until you’re sick and you’ve got, like, bronchitis or a sinus infection and you can’t breathe and you’re miserable. We should be grateful for these things. Grateful that your arms allow you to hug the people that you love. Grateful that your body is digesting your food appropriately. There are people out there who can’t eat solid food because their digestive system is so messed up from some type of illness or medical issue. They would—they would do anything to be able to enjoy food again.

We can be grateful for what our bodies do. And it’s not about comparing suffering. It’s just about slowing down to appreciate that your body is your friend. Your body is on your team. And we need to stop working so hard against our bodies. We can work with our bodies—even on the days that you don’t love how your body looks, that you wish your pants were smaller, that you wish the number on the scale was lower, that you wish you had less pain, that you wish That you wish that XYZ was different. That you wish you didn’t have those wrinkles or those rolls. Your body is still working for you, and you can choose to be respectful to your body, even when you’re frustrated with it.

I had a client that I was working with a couple years ago, and she was constantly, like, all day long—even when she wasn’t aware of it. It was just an automatic, unconscious, habituated behavior that she would body check constantly. It was looking in the mirror, or pinching herself, or looking down at her thighs as she was sitting in her chair. Every time she’d walk past a reflective surface, she’s looking at herself. If there’s a photo, she’s zooming in and scrutinizing herself and picking yourself apart and comparing yourself to the other people in the photo. She would weigh herself at least once a day, if not more times per day.

And one of the things that we started doing was working on intentionally including those acts of body kindness that I was telling you about. And sometimes body kindness means not getting on the scale today because all you’re gonna do is use it to beat yourself up. Sometimes body kindness means going out and getting a new pair of pants that actually fits comfortably. Sometimes body kindness means, hey, I need to drink water today instead of subsisting on Diet Coke and coffee and sparkling water. Sometimes body kindness means I need to stop scrolling on my phone and go to bed early tonight. Sometimes body kindness means that you need to let yourself eat that huge piece of cake that you have been craving and that sounds so satisfying and to listen to your body and to stop when you’re comfortably full.

Body kindness looks different depending on the day, depending on what you need. And lo and behold, the more that she started to intentionally incorporate these acts of body kindness, the less she felt the need to body check and to scrutinize her body and to pick herself apart and to shame herself—because she realized that that wasn’t actually doing her any good. It was making her feel worse. It was keeping her stuck in a cycle, and it was keeping her in that grip of diet culture.

And so I want you to hear that, even though it’s counterintuitive to be nice to yourself when you don’t feel like being nice to yourself, it just might be a game changer for you.

So let’s recap these three habits that are gonna help you get your groove back with intuitive eating, that are gonna give you something to do, something to focus on, something to renew and refresh your energy. The first one is stop eating like it’s your last meal. Stop judging the food and creating food scarcity and giving the food charm by labeling it as good and bad. Listen to your body.

Step No. 2 is challenge the “you shouldn’t eat that” voice. Remind yourself that you have permission to eat. What would feel good to your body right now? And that you get to listen to your body to make that decision.

And habit No. 3 is treat your body like a friend, not a DIY project. And I want you to pick one of these habits. Don’t overwhelm yourself with all three right now. Pick one to start with and do it for a few days or do it for a week—and then pick another one and then another one. But pick one thing and take action on that. That is what I want you to do—take action on this.

Because if you are feeling bored or stale or stuck with intuitive eating, or if you’re just not where you want to be yet for one reason or another, taking action is the only thing that’s gonna change that. Nothing changes if nothing changes. Taking action is going to give you clarity and momentum and traction.

And then I would also invite and challenge you to join us in the Intuitive Eating and Body Kindness Unchallenge—because you’re gonna get that hands-on support and the camaraderie and the specific guidance and action steps, not to mention the tools to help you do it, that are going to help you break your food rules and create more freedom with food, that are going to show you how to be kind to your body, to break up with the scale, to stop letting your self-worth be contingent upon what you see on the scale or what you see in the mirror.

We’re gonna practice the actual skills and mindset shifts that are required and essential for intuitive eating. And so whether you’ve been doing this for five years or you started it five minutes ago, this is going to give you the tools and a space to take action that is going to help you move forward, that’s going to accelerate your progress.

And I just want to invite you to envision where you could be by summer if you take action now. So this summer, instead of avoiding being in the pictures on vacation and having no memories captured of you being on that trip with your family—because you were always the one behind the camera hiding your body. Instead of sitting on the side of the pool covered up when your kids want you to get in and play with them. Instead of telling yourself that you have to have the burger without the bun at the barbecue. Instead of opting to just get a Diet Coke instead of ice cream with your kids, or with your friend, or with your partner on date night. Instead of telling yourself that you have to wear leggings when it’s 95 degrees and humid outside to the park or to the baseball game.

You can actually wear the shorts and let your cellulite be seen—because guess what? Everybody has cellulite. Just imagine if these things are different and you can actually, you know, eat the bun, get in the pool, wear the darn swimsuit, wear the tank top, let your arms be flappy—who cares—go out and live your life fully.

Those are the types of things that we are gonna practice right now that are gonna set you up to have the best summer that you’ve ever had—because you are taking action now. You are changing the way you’re thinking, changing the way that you’re doing things, and it is going to help you feel more hopeful, feel more enthusiastic about your journey. Because this can be a very lonely and challenging process to do it on your own. It can happen very slowly. And this is how you speed it up—how you give yourself that support, that camaraderie, and how you can get coaching with me.

Some of you have been thinking about doing some type of coaching with me, but you’ve been dragging your feet, or you’re on the fence, or you’re just not sure if it’s worth the money. This is one of the lowest-ticket ways that you can work with me and get a taste of my coaching. It’s also the only time that I’m going to be running this program live this year. So if you want that live support during the five days of the Unchallenge, I will be right there in there with you. We’re gonna do some extra live trainings. You are going to get bonus materials that come with it when you sign up right now, not to mention the private community inside of our Facebook group.

And it is going to be such a game changer for you at such an affordable price—because accessibility is important to me. And I know that not everybody can spend hundreds of dollars on these things. And so I have created a program that is well under $100 for you to be able to get in there and get professional support.

So as you can tell, I am excited about this. I 100% think that you need to do it. Even if you’ve done the Unchallenge before and you wanna join us for this live round, just reach out to me. I have a heavily discounted rate that I’ll give you to join us live.

Come on in—the water is warm. Jump on in the pool. We’re gonna swim, we’re gonna party together. And in case nobody has told you today: you are worthy just as you are. We’ll talk again soon.

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