It was January, there was snow on the ground, and she walked into work and everyone else in her office was doing a restrictive New Year’s diet. It didn’t even phase her though, because she no longer even has the desire to go back to dieting. In years past, she would have been right there with them, trading low calorie recipes, and talking about her new workout routine. 

This time, she walks to the breakroom to put her lunch in the fridge, which is full of salads and green smoothies. She sticks her tupperware of leftovers from the night before – pasta primavera with sausage – along with a Reeces PB cup (because she likes the texture when she keeps it in the fridge), and she fills up her coffee (with creamer) and heads to her desk to start working. 

While her coworkers chat about how many pounds they’re hoping to lose this year, and their new morning routines, she spends her break researching tropical destinations for her next vacation. No longer does she fantasize about ordering a smaller swimsuit for the trip, or force herself to cut out carbs the month before every vacation. No longer do vacations become a free-for-all with food, where she gets on the scale to “check the damage” when she gets home. 

Now vacations are…just vacations. Something to look forward to. Daydreaming of a beach in the thick of winter. It’s not about changing her body in order to deserve it or enjoy it. It’s about enjoying her LIFE.

This is all a result of her making the radical decision to ditch diet culture. To heal her relationship with food. To embrace intuitive eating. To heal her body image wounds. To apply gentle nutrition strategies, instead of restrictive dieting for her health. 

So much changed for her in less than a year. Is it all perfect? Not at all. Does she never have hard days? Of course she still does.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing. But her thoughts are no longer consumed by food, calories, what she’s allowed to eat and not eat, whether she exercised enough today, or how much she hates her stomach and thighs. She’s no longer bound by the grip of diet culture. 

There were 4 key areas that she got stuck along the way – and what I’m going to share with you in this episode are the tools and strategies we used at these stuck points to help her move though them. If you are listening to this right now, chances are you’re getting stuck exactly where my client was getting stuck…and this is going to be a bit of a roadmap to show you what to do and how to move forward.

Before we dive into our main topic for 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: Ozone therapy

Ozone therapy refers to medical practices that use ozone gas, which is a form of oxygen, a colorless gas consisting of three oxygen atoms. In the upper atmosphere, a layer of this gas protects the Earth from the sun’s UV radiation.

Forms of Ozone Therapy: 

• Applying it to your skin by exposing a section of your body to ozone gas under a protective covering (also called ozone sauna) or by applying an ozone solution to your skin (often for wound healing).
• Blowing gas into your body, typically through your ears, rectum or vagina.
• Mixing it with your blood. Ozone gas can be dissolved in a sample of your blood and then reintroduced back into your body through an IV through a process called autohemotherapy.
• Ingesting it by consuming small amounts of ozone gas dissolved in oil or water.
• Injecting it into one of your muscles through a shot containing a mixture of oxygen and ozone.

Alternative health practitioners claim it can treat or cure things like: HIV or other infectious diseases, heart disease, cancers, skin conditions, 

In the late 1980s, reports had emerged that German physicians were successfully treating HIV patients with 03-AHT (Autohemotherapy). There was then no pharmaceutical treatment for HIV and a pandemic was feared, so Canadian authorities authorized the study to test safety and efficacy of 03-AHT in AIDS patients. (Spoiler: it doesn’t work)

The FDA has not authorized the use of ozone in ANY medical condition. (Regarding its use as a disinfectant, the FDA states that “for ozone to be effective in killing harmful bacteria, it must be present at a concentration far greater than what is considered safe for humans.”)

Ozone gas can also be dangerous to human health. If a person inhales the gas, it causes a chemical reaction inside the respiratory tract, leading to a number of dangerous health effects. The FDA published a statement in 2020 against using devices that use ozone gas.

Risks include:

• lung and throat irritation
• coughing
• pain in the chest when breathing in
• chest tightness
• wheezing, or shortness of breath
• worsened asthma symptoms

High exposure can lead to lung damage and can be fatal.

Bottom line: Ozone therapy hasn’t been tested in large-scale clinical trials conducted on humans. Until that happens and there’s a better understanding of the risks versus rewards, ozone therapy will continue to be an unregulated, alternative therapy.

If you have an example of Wellness Woo that you want to share, send it to me at rebuildingtrustwithyourbody@gmail.com. 

Ok, that’s enough of that. Moving on to today’s main topic…How Intuitive Eating, Body Image Work, and Gentle Nutrition Changed Everything for my Client in Under a Year

My client got stuck in 4 important ways, and I am going to share what tools and strategies we used in those moments to get her unstuck. (I do have permission to share her story, and I changed a couple of tiny details to keep it anonymous – but the main things that matter are all accurate so that you can learn from her process and apply it for yourself.)

If you are listening to this right now, chances are you’re getting stuck exactly where my client was. When this client came to me, she shared with me that she had been struggling with figuring out how to eat if she wasn’t dieting, tracking her food and counting calories. She liked the idea of IE, but she didn’t know exactly how to put that into action in her everyday life. She had read the IE book, and understood the concepts – but she didn’t have the practical tools and steps yet for how to translate that into what she would eat for dinner, or what it actually looked like to listen to her body. 

• Month 1 – Starting off
  • SCA framework (which is something I teach right off the bat in the 2nd module of NDA)
  • ADHD strategies – this is where we get to really customize things based on my clients’ unique  needs
• About 3-4 months in she got her labs back, and her A1c was still the same as it was from before, which was in the pre-DM range. So we pulled out the tools of gentle nutrition (including my “snack hack”), and we also worked on “decharming” – which I’ll tell you about in a minute. (As a side note – this is exactly why it’s so powerful to work with a non-diet dietitian because we can leverage medical nutrition principles as part of the gentle nutrition process. A large part of my training was on how to help people with health conditions like diabetes, pre-diabetes, high cholesterol, HTN, IBS, and things like that. You don’t have to ignore or sacrifice your health in the name of food freedom and IE. I care very much about your health – and doing it in effective and sustainable ways – and dieting is not one of them.)
  • Gentle nutrition for balancing blood sugar
  • Snack hack
  • Scared to decharm – but we worked through it. Peanut M&Ms. 
• 6 months…Body image – going to a wedding for a college friend
  • closet cleanout, 
  • dress shopping 
  • photo exposures  
  • A few months later, unexplained sudden wt gain – did an audit, didn’t make sense, so sent her to doc and turns out her thyroid was out of whack – what she did NOT do was go back to restricting and dieting – listened to her body, got curious, stayed compassionate, even in the presence of fear and neg body image thoughts
• 9 months…Block against exercise >> reframed as movement >> FSC >> pickleball, rec league soccer, swimming

All of these tools and strategies that we pulled out as she was getting stuck are exactly what I will teach you and help you implement inside Non-Diet Academy, my signature course and group coaching program. This is my most comprehensive program, that is start to finish what you need to know to fully make peace with food, your body, your health, and exercise. This is where you get to have all of these skills, strategies, frameworks and tools to put in your toolkit and to pull out when you need them. 

Having the head knowledge of IE isn’t enough. You must take the practical steps to put it into action AND work through the things that come up for you as you’re trying to do it. There will be emotional hangups that you have, shame stories, old body image wounds, fears and barriers that get in your way, life situations that come up – and things that make it difficult here still existing in diet culture to truly make sense of all of this without the expert guidance and support. 

I only run 2 live cohorts of NDA per year – one in the spring, and one in the fall. And if you’re listening to this in real time in the summer of 2025, then you can grab your spot in the fall cohort of NDA with presale pricing. 

If you’re disqualifying yourself, if you’re saying this isn’t for me, or this isn’t in my budget, send me a DM on IG or FB and we’re going to have a no pressure conversation about it. I’ve got payment plan options, as well as other programs at different price points and levels of support. So if you are desiring some coaching and expert guidance, just reach out and we can chat about what that might look like so that you don’t have to spend another year floundering and treading water. I don’t want you to be stuck in this exact same place (or back on the dieting bandwagon) next summer because you got frustrated with IE and bailed on it. I don’t want you to make up the story that you’re too messed up, or that you don’t have enough self-control, or that you’re too disordered or addicted to food for this to work. 

I want you to get to next summer, and be like one of my other clients who went to a pool party with her coworkers and actually got IN the pool for the first time in over 10 years of going to this annual party. I want you to be like my other client who ate birthday cake with her son for the first time in his life because she’s no longer afraid to let herself eat it. I want you to be like my other client who has become an advocate for bodies of all sizes and is using her experience to show others what is possible and to challenge the narrative of diet culture and weight stigma. I want you to be like so many of my clients whose lives are no longer consumed by food and body shame. I want you to be able to live life to the fullest – because you’re no longer controlled by the grip of diet culture. 

That’s exactly what’s possible for you. I know this because I’ve seen it hundreds of times with the women I’ve worked with. EVERYTHING can change for you when you lean into this process of healing your relationship with food and your body, and I don’t say that lightly.

You deserve peace and freedom with food, with your body and WITHIN YOURSELF. 

In case nobody has told you today – you are worthy just as you are. We’ll talk again soon.

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