Episode 237: This week I'm chatting with Katherine Kimber, a UK based registered dietician. We focus on intuitive eating, looking at how Katherine uses it with clients and some of the common struggles clients have when applying intuitive eating.
Katherine is a Registered Dietitian and Founder of Nude Nutrition on a mission to help people to find food happiness! Katherine offers 1:1 coaching, runs a community and group courses to help people break out of a negative relationship with food.
Katherine has completed an extensive amount of formal education and training with a first-class degree in Nutrition and Dietetics from King’s College London, and a distinction in her Masters in Clinical Research. She has an NHS background and is a Certified Intuitive Eating Counsellor.
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 237 of Real Health Radio. You can find the show notes and the links talked about as part of this episode at www.seven-health.com/237.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. I’m a nutritionist that specialises in recovery from disordered eating and eating disorders, or really just helping anyone who has a messy relationship with food and body and exercise.
Today on the show, it’s a guest interview, and my guest is Katherine Kimber. Katherine is a registered dietitian and founder of Nude Nutrition. On a mission to help people find food happiness, Katherine offers 1:1 coaching, runs a community and group courses to help people break out of a negative relationship with food. Katherine has completed an extensive amount of formal education and training, with a first-class degree in nutrition and dietetics from King’s College London, and a distinction in her master’s in clinical research. She has an NHS background and is a certified Intuitive Eating counsellor.
I’ve been aware of Kat for a while. I think I first heard her on Laura Thomas’s Don’t Salt My Game podcast, and since then I’ve seen her on Instagram and I wanted to have her on the show. As part of the episode, we talk about Kat’s background and her training as a dietitian, her relationship with food growing up, working as a dietitian as part of the NHS and then transitioning into private practice. She talks about her time working in a weight loss clinic and how this made her own food issues worse, but ultimately was what helped her to discover intuitive eating and move into a weight-neutral way of practicing.
Kat has trained as an intuitive eating counsellor, so a lot of our conversation revolves around intuitive eating, how she uses it with clients, some of the areas that clients struggle with when they try applying intuitive eating and take it from the theoretical concept into real life, and then we also touch on acceptance and commitment therapy (or ACT). It was great getting to speak with Kat, and there’s a lot of practical ideas as part of this one, so I hope you find it helpful. So here is my conversation with Kat, or Katherine Kimber.
Hey, Kat. Thanks so much for joining me on the show today.
Katherine Kimber: Hi, Chris. Thanks very much for having me. Very excited to be here today.
Chris Sandel: Nice. You’re a UK registered dietitian, and you originally worked for the NHS and now you’ve set up your own private practice. You’re certified in intuitive eating as an intuitive eating counsellor. You’ve trained in acceptance and commitment therapy and NLP, and your focus now with clients is from a non-diet and non-intentional weight loss perspective. These are all areas that I want to be able to chat with you about today, and I think we’ve got a lot of common ground in the way that we work with clients and the way we think about things.
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But I guess just as a starting place, I’d like to chat about you more personally. What was your relationship with food like while growing up?
Katherine Kimber: The first time I remember food becoming a bit of a thing for me was probably the age of 12-13. What I see typically with lots of clients that I work with is it’s the typical age where your body’s starting to change. My weight was increasing at that time, and I had a few comments thrown at me around ‘thunder thighs’ and ‘chubby cheeks’ and all of those difficult things that teenage girls are going through. A few comments from different places along the way that I think exacerbated a negative relationship with food at that time.
And I remember – now looking back at it, knowing what I now know, I would say my relationship with food started to be a little bit binge-y. At that time, my brother was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, so there was a lot of focus on him in the household, lots of fun food around. At the time it was labelled as ‘naughty’ food. So we had access to this ‘fun’ drawer, and I remember going through periods of time where I was actually eating a lot of food in one go, and that then led to gaining some weight, and then comments about my body led me to restricting.
I was only at the time doing really quite subtle things – reading magazines and trying diet pills with my pocket money. Just things that at the time I wouldn’t have deemed that extreme. I didn’t do anything for a long period of time. It was just “I’ll try this for a week” and then it didn’t work.
Anyway, I think that got me interested in food in general, and I actually wanted to be a chef. I was always interested in cooking, and my mum was a nurse, so I had that nurse-y, help-y side of me thrown in the mix as well. It was only when I got to the age of 17-18 that I had more of an interest in food, and that relationship with food kind of got a little bit more sensible, but it was still very focused around exercising and trying to control my weight and what I was eating. Me and my friends at school would talk about dieting and different ways in which we could eat, and it was all really about trying to get thinner.
Anyway, when I was looking at all of my university options, I came across nutrition and dietetics, which I’d never heard about. I thought that was a great marriage of my interest in food but also the nurse-y side of things where I was contemplating, “Do I go down that nursing avenue? Do I go down some sort of nutrition avenue?” It just felt like the perfect thing for me to do. I think my interest in food was genuine. I was always interested in cooking and food technology and I always excelled at that. But I think what was always underneath that was this desire to want to know everything to try and fix my own body and fix everyone else. [laughs]
So I went to King’s in London and did my undergraduate degree there in nutrition and dietetics, and I guess that’s when – I think at that time my relationship with food became probably a bit more stable, when I learnt a little bit more about the fact that nutrition isn’t as black-and-white as I think I was led to believe growing up.
But yeah, in my household I think generally it was very much – my parents dieted, but it was very much – it’s hard to know what normal is, isn’t it? But there was nothing too extreme going on. I had a very good relationship with my parents and my brothers. It was a very loving, nice, caring family, but I think I just got caught up in the diet culture that we live in.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. You mentioned there dieting with friends. Was there dieting together within the household? So doing it with your mom or doing it with your dad or brothers or anything like that?
Katherine Kimber: No, it was very secretive on my behalf. It was always something that was in my head but I never really voiced. But at school, I remember a friend in particular where we used to talk about just crazy things, like it would be only eating protein at one meal and then only eating carbs at the next. I knew some of the girls were doing more extreme things, like SlimFast, but I always saw myself as “I’m not going to do anything extreme.” But essentially it was still dieting.
I think it was more fun discussions and challenges with friends as opposed to – it almost felt like a lot of it was more in my head as opposed to joining up with a friend or a relative to do something together. Because actually, at that time, when I got to 16-17, I had thinned out. I knew in the back of my head trying to pursue weight loss in a thin body wouldn’t have made sense to people. You don’t ‘need’ to lose weight. So I kind of knew it was in my head, and I was embarrassed and ashamed to say “I’m going to go on a diet.”
Chris Sandel: But then in your head, what were you hoping to achieve by going on that diet? Were you able to recognise the size of your body? Or there was still the feeling of “If it’s smaller, then things will be better”?
Katherine Kimber: Yeah, definitely “if it’s smaller things will be better.” I’d go to the gym and I’d want to be more toned, and very influenced by – luckily not social media because we didn’t have that, but magazines and wanting to look that thin ideal, and very toned and lean. Especially when you’re 17-18, you’re starting to go out with friends. I was naturally thin, but not as thin as some of my friends. So I think it was like, “I want to try and look like her.” It was all in my head as opposed to externally voicing it.
Chris Sandel: The thing is, no matter how thin you are, there is always someone who is thinner. This is the thing with clients. I’m typically having the same conversation, irrespective of where someone is on the weight spectrum, because you can always find someone who is thinner or “how I’d like this thing to be different or that thing to be different.” In a sense, if you’re going down that road, there is no final destination.
Katherine Kimber: No. Exactly. You’re always going to find someone to compare yourself to.
Chris Sandel: I know you live in Poole now. Is that where you grew up?
Katherine Kimber: No, I grew up in Essex. It was when I moved to do my degree – I moved to London when I was 17-18 and lived there for in total about eight years or so, doing my undergraduate degree. And before my degree I had a boyfriend that was at London University, so I actually stayed up there quite a lot then. I went to school in Southend, which was about an hour commute from my home. It’s not really relevant to talk about that. [laughs] But yeah, I went to King’s in London, did my undergraduate for four years, and then I started working in the NHS.
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Chris Sandel: There was something you said with by studying, that helped you to start to have a better relationship with food or think about food differently and not in such black-and-white terms. Can you expand on that a little bit?
Katherine Kimber: Yeah. I guess I didn’t really learn too much about eating disorders and weight stigma and non-diet approaches and things like that. Didn’t learn about those at all as a dietitian in my undergraduate. Learnt a bit about eating disorders and things like that. But in my training, it was always “Oh, that’s a real specialist area, that. It’s really difficult to get any kind of experience in.” I had a bit of an interest in it, but I wonder whether I backed away from engaging in that because in my head, I knew it was still an issue for me.
So in my dietetic training, I guess – and in hindsight, looking back now, it was probably even quite rife in the course with the other students. Not everyone, but I can think of a few people that probably had that kind of – not obsession, but very, very health-conscious hat on of “eating a salad at lunch is healthy and we shouldn’t eat anything with sugar in it.” I think it toned the behaviours and the restriction, binges, and things like that down. But I think I just found a way of maintaining a level of restriction, but at the time it wasn’t so – the side effects of that weren’t outweighing the positives of engaging in some of that restrictive behaviour.
I always think there’s a tipping point. When I work with clients, they’re like “I’ve maintained this for so many years.” Actually, what we have to consider is the impact of some of those behaviours, and for some people, the impact of engaging in restrictive behaviour is there’s no real pros, there’s no major cons. You might not get those outcomes. It’s not having a negative effect.
And then there’s a group in the middle, which was probably me at this time, where the positives of engaging in this counting calories and trying to cut out certain food groups, but in a sensible way that we’re taught as dietitians, to cut this out and don’t eat too much of that – the negative side effects of that – binging or feeling out of control, feeling guilty and anxious around food, all of those things weren’t as much of a problem as the benefits of maybe feeling that sense of superiority of “I’m on something, I’m keeping my body in this shape, I’m feeling good for periods of time.” So I was able to stay there for a while. It came and went, really, the levels of restriction.
I worked as a specialist kidney dietitian for a while. I did lots of different specialties on the ward in the NHS. I did a bit of diabetes work and worked in respiratory wards and the general surgery ward. So I was doing lots of things that really took me away from the diet-y side of work, the eating disorder side of this work. Actually, it was very much about getting people to eat enough food.
It was really only when I did a little bit of weight management in the clinic, in the NHS, and in my head, because we were working in the NHS seeing clients maybe once every couple of months or six weeks for maybe 30 minutes maximum, in my head I was thinking, “Of course these people aren’t getting outcomes because we’re not seeing them for long enough periods of time.” Also, I remember this attitude of “Maybe they’re not telling the truth on their food diaries.” Just a really, really horrible – looking back, just such a horrible attitude. But it was almost the attitude that we were taught, like “We need to get these people thinner, and if they’re not getting thinner it’s their fault.”
I remember having a go at trying to do the very low-calorie diet as a bit of a trial with one of the other dietitians in the clinic, and both of us were like, “This is ridiculous.” It just didn’t sit with me very well. It didn’t resonate with me. I dabbled in this weight loss clinic; it wasn’t my main specialty, but it was always something I picked up once a week. It was something that I had a bit of interest in, but it just didn’t sit that well with me. Anyway, I was doing that amongst other things.
Then an opportunity came for me to do a master’s in clinical research back at King’s. I was already working still with King’s after graduating, engaging in research, because it was something I was really passionate about and really enjoyed and carried on publishing some of the papers and things off the back of my dissertations. It was there that I got myself out of being in the NHS setting and went and did a master’s for a year, which was amazing. I had that job seconded for me and got a scholarship to go and do this master’s degree.
It was only when I was there that – something about going back in the NHS, it just didn’t have a pull for me. The opportunity came up to work in this private weight loss clinic, and I think the reason I wanted to go and work in this weight loss clinic was because this private practice was very, very fancy, and it was a bit of a gateway for me to get into the private setting, because I had no idea how that industry worked as a dietitian back then. It was really there, working in that clinic, that exacerbated all the issues I’d had with food growing up, and the dieting. I was like, “I’m going to try this meal plan we’re suggesting with clients.” We were putting people on these very tailored, flexible meal plans. We were working with them very closely on a weekly basis.
That was when I realised, I can’t do this. I’m seeing clients as well that are coming back, and it’s their last-ditch attempt of another diet, and some people were coming to this clinic and then doing another round. It was like, this just isn’t sitting with me. And actually, we’d have people come into that clinic who were generally living in quite thin bodies, just wanting to take the extra inch off. It was just something that didn’t sit with me.
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Anyway, that’s when I came across Laura Thomas and her podcast Don’t Stop My Game, non-diet approaches, Christy Harrison, Fiona Willer, intuitive eating, and Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch. I found this non-diet approach at that time, early in that clinic, and found that these diet attempts were exacerbating my own negative relationship with food. It was almost I reached a bit of a turning point of “This has been going on and off for some years. I’m going to try and change this.”
So I actually tried to get some therapy at that time. I was obviously very ashamed because I was a dietitian, and I was like, “I should have a handle on this. I’m not doing anything extreme. I don’t understand. I’m just trying to count calories and be careful and be mindful and not eat too much sugar and do exercise and all of the things that are normalised in our society.”
Chris Sandel: Were you at that stage opening up to the people in the clinic of “Hey, I’m trying to do this and it doesn’t seem to be working for me”?
Katherine Kimber: No. It was a very inward, shameful experience. That’s when I realised I had to get out of there. I just couldn’t – it wasn’t sitting with me. I didn’t want to work in that setting. I was not only experiencing the negative side effects myself, but seeing it firsthand as well. It was almost as if we had groups of people in that clinic – there were people that could just follow the plan and lose some weight, off they went and we never heard from them again. There were large chunks of clients that we saw that we were just stuck with. We didn’t really know how to handle them. And that’s when, looking back, these non-diet approaches would’ve been far more suitable and less harmful.
I remember asking the clinic and really trying to work with this small family-run business, “Can we do some research on this?” I had a really research head on me, and that was really important to my practice. I said, “Can we go back and look at the stats? Because from what I can see and what we know, weight loss is really not sustained within the majority. How do we know this is the case in this clinic when we don’t actually have any data that we follow up?” The head of the practice at the time basically didn’t want to because he was scared of what they would find.
For me, that was like, that just confirms – we don’t even hold on to that data. It just wasn’t sitting with me on a number of levels.
Chris Sandel: And even the people who you say lost some weight and went off and you didn’t hear back from them, my thoughts are either (a) this was their first diet, so that’s why it worked at least in the short term, and that was going to come back, you just needed more time – or (b) they were people who then developed a very disordered relationship with food or even an eating disorder and that was their way of being able to keep it up, which is not the holy grail.
Katherine Kimber: Yeah. I do believe that those that perhaps may have been able to go off and maintain – although we don’t have that data – again, this is a bit of an assumption, but I imagine they’re living a bit of a life of that self-monitoring, self-control, cutting carbs and only eating 12 almonds and all of that kind of stuff we were feeding into them.
And I feel awful saying this because it feels so shameful as a dietitian to look back and go, oh my God, I could’ve done harm. In fact, I probably did do harm. But I think it’s kind of part and parcel of our development, and now I look back and realise, we weren’t taught about this at university, and since then I’ve gone in and done some lecturing down here at Bournemouth and helped other students not experience what I had to experience of not really knowing much about weight stigma and these non-diet approaches that can be really helpful for a lot of people.
But anyway, I found this work, and I actually ran away from it for about six months. I was like, “No, this can’t be true. It challenges everything I’ve ever learnt.” I was trying to piece it all together, and also trying to incorporate that in some ways into this clinic that I was in, like “How can I bring this non-diet approach into this clinic?” But it obviously didn’t work because people are coming to you with a very clear goal of weight loss. It was a very mixed and confusing message for people.
Chris Sandel: Yes, because with clients that I work with, I’ll have an initial call with them and work out “What are your goals?” If someone is saying, “I want to lose weight and that is the goal of us working together”, my first response is “That’s just not what I do. And if that is your goal, then we are not the right fit.” I’m not judging that person; they have the right to do what they want to do. But my practice is not the solution for them.
It sounds the same for you. You can’t try and smuggle things in because you have an agenda. [laughs]
Katherine Kimber: No, it’s not right, and it doesn’t work, and it’s not how it should be. Like you say, if they’ve come for something else, you can’t be delivering something different. So it wasn’t fitting, and it was obviously very uncomfortable because that was my job. It was my full-time job, working in this clinic. I was like, “Right, what do I do from here?”
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What I did then was learn about these non-diet approaches, gave myself a lot of compassion, had some clinical supervision, and that was the time when I also did a business start-up accelerator course and decided, “I’m going to start my own business and move out of this work.” When I first started my private practice, it was a bit of a broad “I’m a general ‘can help with anything and everything’”, and then probably after about a year, I really niched that down, after I’d done a lot more training and supervision and got my head around this completely new way of working.
Now, further down the line, this is my bread and butter. This is what I do, and I’m just so passionate about it because it just threads throughout – I feel like it runs through my core of like “I get this, I’m so passionate about this, this has affected me personally.” It’s almost like the final piece of the puzzle for my dietetic. It just feels right. I just feel a lot more stable and just content in the approach that I’m delivering. It just feels ethical and feels right.
Chris Sandel: Nice. I think that is such a dilemma that a lot of nutritionists or dietitians come up against, which is “I’ve been trained in this way, which is putting people on diets or focus on weight loss, and at some point I’m realising that that’s not what I want to be doing anymore”, and there’s this cognitive dissonance of like “How do I extricate myself?”
To then be where you are now, where you’re running a practice that feels very much in alignment with your values, how you want to work with people. I think it’s so nice, and it’s what I’ve discovered and what I do. How I’m helping clients is truly how I believe it should be done, and the things I’m talking about with clients are understanding real physiology and how the body works and all of the pieces where it’s not like I’m saying these things to clients and then behind the scenes I’m thinking something different. It is 100% in alignment.
Katherine Kimber: Yeah. And I think back then, I did believe that weight loss was the right thing and that’s what people needed to do to improve their health. Actually, what I’ve learnt is that beliefs can be changed very quickly with new information. And actually, I think that’s what I needed, to hear this new information. I was like, oh my God. It just completely changed a lot for me personally, but also then professionally. Rather than delivering something that you’re like, “Gosh, how are they doing that? I know I couldn’t do that myself.” [laughs] Like, horrible.
Chris Sandel: So when you discovered intuitive eating, were you at a place where you felt like you were already there as an intuitive eater? Or you discovered that and then were able to use the principles yourself and use intuitive eating to help with your eating?
Katherine Kimber: Yeah, I think that’s how it more so went. For me, I’ve realised – I have had therapy, but not actually around food since then. But actually I feel like all I personally needed was those tools to understand it all. Having had my background and dietetic degree and understanding the research, I felt very capable and equipped to be able to apply everything to myself.
I guess it’s probably what exacerbated my learning a little bit, because I was so personally invested in learning and understanding it. I was then able to apply that to myself and it made a lot of sense. But until I felt comfortable with my own relationship with food – that’s why I practiced in general way before really delving into this work, because I think trying to learn yourself at the same time as delivering it would just not be right, really. You need to heal your own relationship with food before you’re trying to help other people heal their own relationship with food.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, you have to be far enough along. There’s this episode of The Simpsons I’m thinking about where Marge Simpson wants to become a piano teacher and she’s like, “I just have to be one lesson ahead of the students.” [laughs] That is not the right approach with this.
Katherine Kimber: No, exactly. [laughs] But don’t get me wrong, I’m still learning. I’m still learning lots, but you’ve got that foundation, you’re a safe practice, you’re confident in this approach, you’re confident in your own knowledge around it and the experience of doing it and delivering it. I think it would be very unsettling for the client to have this work delivered by someone that was only one step ahead. [laughs] It wouldn’t really work very well.
Chris Sandel: No, you don’t want to be triggered by something a client says and have that start to shake your foundation about beliefs around weight or dieting or any of those kinds of things. You need to be very steadfast in where you’re at.
Katherine Kimber: Yeah, definitely.
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Chris Sandel: What about with your training, and maybe even since? I know you said you’ve continued to keep in contact with King’s College. I’d just be interested to find out where things are at there now, if you know. As a bit of context, I have a client who I’m working with now who is just starting her training as a dietitian. She’s based in the US, and in her pre-materials that were sent over just before she started, there was a whole section and resources all about Health at Every Size. And then on their first day of class, they were talking about diet culture and the harms it causes and the importance of understanding clients’ relationship with food and each person’s individual relationship with food. Hearing this made me smile so much.
It sounds as though there was none of that in your training when you took it, but do you have a sense of where that’s at now?
Katherine Kimber: That sounds amazing, what your client’s getting. From what I understand – when I was doing my dietetic training, I had education around weight management, and it was very much about “We know it’s difficult for people to maintain weight loss. We know people can lose weight, we know it’s difficult to maintain, and we just need to help people find a way that works for them to maintain that.” We also learnt about the statistics of not everyone would be able to bring their weight down to that ‘healthy’ BMI range.
We also learnt about weight stigma, but it was very much focused on how to reduce stigma in the weight loss clinic, so it’d be make sure the chairs don’t have edges to them, and just the language you use and just some really, really basic things.
Chris Sandel: The amount of cognitive dissonance that it takes for that to happen – I think when I had Fiona Willer on the podcast, she used the analogy of like, “Let’s reduce the stigma with homosexuality so that gay conversion clinics can still go ahead.” Is it that kind of thinking, like “How do we reduce weight stigma in a weight loss clinic that is basically about how to get you to lose weight because if you don’t lose weight, you’re unhealthy, you’re unattractive”, fill in the blank.
Katherine Kimber: It doesn’t make sense. It just doesn’t make sense. We have the British Dietetic Association here, and I know they have been a little bit more forthcoming with getting on board with weight stigma, but I feel like with – I don’t actually know exactly what’s going on in terms of training on this at the moment at King’s College. I know in the UK we are becoming a bit more aware of it.
Previously, a few years ago, I remember trying to get in touch with King’s to see if I could deliver a training, but there was a lot of resistance. I think there’s still a lot of resistance to it. They and the BDA are happy to approach things from a weight stigma angle and reducing that, but I think rejecting that whole idea of maybe weight loss is actually more harmful than we’re led to believe – I think that’s something yet to be thoroughly challenged.
I do feel like there’s a level of lip service paid to these things, but not really any kind of meat. I think the UK are just a little bit behind Australia and America with this stuff. Any work that I’ve tried to do with BDA and some of the things here, it’s very much like, right, I think the approach we really need to look at is perhaps we do still have these options for weight loss clinics and for those that – I feel like a middle ground would be having those weight loss clinics but also having clinics and opening our eyes up to helping people realise and understand and be educated on the fact that individuals can improve their health in the body that they’re in without pursuing weight loss. But I feel like there needs to be these two avenues that are offered as an initial first step.
Chris Sandel: And I agree with you only because I think it’s hard to take a bigger step than that. Not that I think that that is where it should end, but I’m in agreement that I think to go further than that to start with is just unlikely to get off the ground.
Katherine Kimber: Yeah. But I also think in terms of offering weight management clinics or whatever they’re called now in the NHS, I think there almost needs to be a new label and something completely different so that it’s not even encompassed within that umbrella. Because that in itself I think just makes people run a million miles.
So yeah, in answer to your question, I actually don’t know. Like I said, I have lectured at Bournemouth University, a local university down here, on non-diet approaches, and it was received really well. I think the younger generation of dietitians, especially on social media, are very, very open to being more flexible and new ways of seeing things. But I can see how especially those that work in weight management clinics and bariatrics, it would be very, very challenging to understand the depths of this work.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. I think that’s what makes this so difficult in terms of they are then going to have a big say about what should be also included in dietetics training. They’re taking a very different approach and have a different set of ideas.
Katherine Kimber: It’s really hard because when I have tried to get involved, it very much is about not being able to be paid for the work that you do. It’s additional work outside of your running of a business. As much as I’d love to go in there and give it my all and make some changes and do some education and run some webinars and run some training, actually, when you’re trying to run a business and make a living, it’s not really that compatible.
Chris Sandel: Yep.
Katherine Kimber: So I had to have a discussion with my mentor, who was a bit like, “Kat, you need to not take your eye off the ball on your own business. If you’re doing that work for free and you’re not getting paid for it, you’re not going to have a business either and not be able to help anyone.” It’s like, yeah, that’s true.
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Chris Sandel: I think it would be useful to talk a bit about intuitive eating and how you are using it with clients. For you, how do you bring intuitive eating in when working with clients? Is it the foundation of everything you’re doing? How do you think about it?
Katherine Kimber: I think it’s really about assessing where an individual is at on their journey. I think about it as a scale. You’ve got a 0 in the middle, +10 at one end, which is fully-fledged Health at Every Size activism, and -10, which is fully-fledged dieter. I think it’s about really assessing where someone is on their journey. I will have some clients – they’re on the +1, +2, +3 side of things where they know about intuitive eating and they really want to learn more about this approach and are excited by that. They might’ve already read the book, listened to some podcasts.
Then you’ve got other people that are on the -5 end of the spectrum that you’re really just trying to help them perhaps look at their own history of dieting, how that’s not worked for them, and you’re trying to bring them up to level 0. So I do draw upon intuitive eating in my practice, but I use parts of that amongst other approaches and ways of working. It’s never for me like, “Right, Step 1, ditch the diet mentality, this is what we’re doing. Step 2, honouring your hunger.” It’s a really fluid approach.
I don’t necessarily always, at session one, give a massive education on what intuitive eating is and the background and the history. I work with the client where they’re at and what stage of change they’re on, where they are in their journey. And that doesn’t mean I’m selling one thing and then offering another or leading them into something that they’re not aware of. There is very much – on that discovery call and through my website, people know that this is a non-diet approach. But I think the understanding of what exactly a non-diet approach is needs nurturing.
I think sometimes going in hard with “this is about body acceptance and rejecting the diet mentality” can actually make someone, where this work could actually be very beneficial to them, could make them run a million miles away. So I think you just have to be very careful with the pace in which you move with someone.
Chris Sandel: Completely. Pretty much everyone that I work with, there is ambivalence. There is like “I understand this, but I also have fears about that and I’m confused about these pieces.” And the more I try and push an agenda, the more that someone will come up with all the reasons for the counterargument for that. So it has to be much more collaborative and much more exploring and, as you said, finding out where someone’s at and then going at a right pace for that individual.
And just so I know and the listeners know, what kind of clients are you working with? Is it predominantly dieters and chronic dieters? Are you working with disordered eating? Are you working with eating disorders? What is your client base?
Katherine Kimber: I do a mixture. I promote myself as someone that works with chronic dieters, disordered eating, people that feel a lot of anxiety around food, want to feel more free around food. But naturally, I do get people that fall into that category of eating disorders as well. Where I’m working with individuals online, I’ll make an assessment as to how appropriate that is to see them over the internet as opposed to actually suggesting and helping them find support where they can be seen in person and be monitored a bit more closely.
But yeah, there is such an overlap. I definitely do work with people that have eating disorders. It’s just I don’t shout about “come to me” sort of thing. And I have regular supervision and feel very comfortable and competent in supporting those clients.
Chris Sandel: Yeah.
00:41:39
If we say with the intuitive eating piece for a moment – and I know you said you introduce it at different points or it’s not going through Principle 1, Principle 2, Principle 3 – and just for listeners, I’ve done podcasts looking in detail at the principles of intuitive eating. I’ve interviewed Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, who are the co-creators of intuitive eating. So I’ll link to those episodes in the show notes. We’re not going to go through each of the principles.
But I’d love to hear from you, where do you find that clients most struggle with intuitive eating? What are the common stumbling blocks for clients? And it doesn’t necessarily even have to be intuitive eating. It can just be where do people get stuck when they’re transitioning from dieting to the more non-diet approach?
Katherine Kimber: I find that people get stuck a little bit more – there’s that initial “I’m getting help, I’m finding this new support, I really do understand rejecting the diet mentality and letting go of diets”, and even though logically there’s that knowledge of “I can’t go back to diets and my body might not change”, I think there’s nearly always that expectation in the back of the head, back of clients’ mind. Or not expectation, that hope of “Maybe my body will change. Maybe I will lose the weight that I’ve been hoping to lose.”
So I think one of the most difficult things we can come up against is this realisation of “Maybe it really is impossible for me” or “Maybe this really won’t change my body in the way that I was hoping for.” I think letting go of that desire for weight loss or being able to learn to live with that little niggling voice that’s there that often does and will continue to poke its head up – I think that can be one of the most difficult things. Especially for those that are living in larger bodies where society is often stigmatising. And maybe also where family members and partners don’t fully understand what they’re doing and why.
I think that is probably the most difficult part of it, trying to find that body neutrality and finding a way to be more respectful and accepting and neutral towards the body that they’re in, and just recognising that we are ever-changing human beings, and our body’s never going to stay the same. Is that what you would say is the same for you?
Chris Sandel: That’s definitely one of the ones that comes up. I can go through some of the things that I notice, but with this one, what are some of the ways that you help with people or that have been useful in helping someone get through that place or get more to a point of acceptance or neutrality, as you said? Are there certain things that you find to be really helpful?
Katherine Kimber: Yeah. It’s a real process, and I think that first session with clients of setting up expectations of this work ahead is so important, and helping people to realise that – I like to describe like almost being in a bit of a dark room and this analogy that I’ve heard somewhere down the line of having a string of fairy lights zig-zagging across the ceiling. We really are just turning on one little fairy light at a time. There’s no big ‘aha’ moment, the lights are on, everything feels good. Just really setting that expectation that this is a difficult road. It’s not an impossible road, but sometimes it almost feels worse before things start to feel better again.
So I think expectations is super, super key, and then some of the training that I’ve done as well is in acceptance and commitment therapy. Do you want me to talk a little bit about that?
Chris Sandel: Yeah, that’d be useful.
00:45:52
Katherine Kimber: Acceptance and commitment therapy is an evidence-based model which helps support us to really understand and try and be with all of our human experiences, including the really difficult and painful ones whilst trying to also support us to allow clients to direct your time and energy towards the things that actually really matter to you and offer you that meaningful life.
What we’ll look at when it comes to this discomfort in being in the body that you’re in is going back to, “What have you tried in terms of past experiences of dieting, and how has that gone for you?” So really doing a lot of reflective work so that they can not only hear this from me and the science and other health care professionals, but actually for themselves have this deep understanding of “Gosh, this has really affected me. I’ve been so persistent at this for so long, and it hasn’t actually got me to the place I wanted it to get me to. And in fact, it’s resulted in – what I thought was a solution to the problem was actually causing me more problems.”
So really doing some deep reflection around that, and also looking at what that time and energy has taken you away from that really matters to you. So really looking at, what do you value? What’s important to you? What is this holding you back from that’s important to you? I think with any kind of change, when it comes to this work, there’s a formula that I’ve learnt, and that is that discomfort plus vision plus clarity on first steps needs to be greater than the natural resistance or societal resistance to change.
We know that there’s a discomfort that you might be experiencing in your body, but what we need is a bit of a vision, the what and the why, and how this is holding you back, and then some kind of clarity on what can be done here. Otherwise, I think people can feel a little bit stuck in this discomfort. So a lot of work around values, discovering what’s important to you.
There are a number of core processes to acceptance and commitment therapy that really help someone to learn to be able to observe these uncomfortable thoughts without being necessarily ruled by them. So being able to maybe hear the negative voices coming in and saying, “This would be better if you were thinner” – or an uncomfortable thought that might be coming in about someone’s body is “You’ve gained weight”, something like that that might be coming up for an individual – and we’re looking to notice some of those thoughts and help that individual to continue to live the life that they want to live, this more meaningful life, in the service of what actually is important to them and what matters as opposed to being ruled by these uncomfortable thoughts.
So it’s a willingness and acceptance to experience these difficult thoughts but not letting them actually take over. The likelihood is, in our head we’re pumping out hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thoughts every single day, and the likelihood of me or you saying something in session to a client or the therapist maybe saying something at the next session, it’s very unlikely that that’s going to eradicate all the unhelpful thoughts that have been there for a number of years around their body. Rather than trying to fight with those thoughts, it’s about noticing them, but distancing ourselves from them.
There’s lots of techniques that I draw upon within that to really help someone identify, finding ways to accept and continue to live the life that matters to them in the body that they’re in. There’s a really great article by Kate Harding called ‘The Fantasy of Weight Loss’. Have you heard of that?
Chris Sandel: No, but if you could share it with me, I will definitely put it in the show notes.
Katherine Kimber: I will share it with you because there’s a link that’s like gold dust to get hold of. So I will definitely send that to you. But it’s an article written by someone that’s living in a larger body herself, and she writes quite bluntly but also really powerfully about like, what are you holding yourself back from? And I often share that with clients, which can be really helpful.
Also, I think what can be helpful with clients as they’re moving through this is just sitting with that discomfort and sharing this idea as well that letting go of that thin body that’s been desired for so many years or that certain body that’s been desired for so many years can induce a bit of a grieving process.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, totally.
Katherine Kimber: So helping you to understand where you might be on that grieving process to really help normalise it as well – this is what happens, this is normal, it’s okay. Again, there’s a really great article written by Meredith Noble, who’s a dietitian. Her website is meredithnoble.com and the article on ‘Grieving the Thin Ideal’. She goes through the different stages of grieving and what might be helpful as you’re going through those different stages. Again, a really great resource I often share with clients as well.
I think working from changing some of those beliefs, looking at values, and then helping that individual build up some skills to learn to respect and take care of the body they’re in actually then start to help change behaviours and the environment in which they’re in – social media and who they surround themselves by and the conversations that are had. But I think the work that needs to be done is really around the beliefs and values.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. Thank you for all of that. There was lots of really good ideas in there. I do think about things in a lot of the same way. I think acceptance and commitment therapy is great in terms of starting to notice how thoughts think themselves and how emotions are generated on their own. And just because you’ve had a thought, doesn’t mean that it’s true. It doesn’t mean that you believe it. It doesn’t mean that you even need to pay it any attention or entertain it. They are self-generated. And the same with emotions.
So just because you’re having a strong emotion or a strong thought, doesn’t mean that you need to be pulled in a certain direction. And yes, that can be challenging and uncomfortable, but you’re not at the mercy of those things even though in the moment it can feel that you very much are, or that it’s making it likely that this thing is going to happen. It’s not your destiny. I think understanding that can be quite helpful.
I also find for me, talking about the fact that I have the same conversation with clients wherever they are on the weight spectrum. I think there’s this feeling of “If I was thinner, then it will be different”, and actually that’s not true because everything is relative. So imagine the person whose body you would swap with in a heartbeat, and then ask yourself, would you be surprised if that person also had issues around their body? My answer with that is always categorically no, I would not be surprised if that person had issues around their body because they’re a human being, and we live in the world that we live in.
There are times where clients can say, “But I did lose weight and I was happier, I was more confident” or whatever, but with that, it was doing something that was highly unsustainable. So even though it worked for some temporary amount of time, everything then caught up with them. It worked for a while and then the extreme hunger came back, or then they started getting injured. It wasn’t sustainable. It can be very easy to say “Hey, I want to get back there” and look at that through rose-tinted glasses, but the reality is that often that time that they celebrate and think was so amazing actually wasn’t as amazing as they are remembering. It’s been immortalized and thought about differently to how it actually occurred. So I think that can be a helpful thing for people to start to recognise.
But I also think as well, understanding that this is internal, inner work – that the person who has a peaceful relationship with their body, it’s because of the work that they’ve done or the things that they think in their head. Because again, you can have people all across the weight spectrum who are truly miserable in their body, and you can have people all across the weight spectrum who are truly happy and content and accepting of their body. And the one difference between those two people is what is going on in their head and in their mind.
I think it can be very easy to say, “But society puts all of this pressure on you, and this is the thin ideal and what society holds up”, and one of the ways that I approach this with clients is looking at, there are lots of things that you do in your life that you don’t care about what society thinks. Like, you’re covered head to toe in tattoos, or you’re an atheist despite the fact that everyone around you is highly religious. But with those, you don’t second-guess it. You’re like “That’s who I am. I have no problem with it.” This thing where you struggle isn’t because of what society thinks. And it’s not to say that society doesn’t make it more challenging, but it’s where your belief really lies with this that is actually making the difference in your lived experience.
Katherine Kimber: Yeah, I love that. That is so true. People across the weight spectrum have the same sorts of difficulties. Coming back to the beliefs, I think beliefs can be changed very quickly. When we believe for so many years that Father Christmas is true and then we get new information, we’re like, “Oh.” That might bring some sadness, but we’re very capable of quickly changing our beliefs with new information. But I think sometimes it’s the willingness to engage in that information or accept it.
Chris Sandel: It is. I think for me where that analogy breaks down is that even when you find out Father Christmas isn’t true, the presents are still coming. [laughs] Your parents are still giving you the presents. So in a sense, the fantasy or the belief about where these presents have come from changed, but it’s still carrying on. Whereas with your body, it’s a different thing because you’re changing your beliefs and that is also going to lead to a different outcome.
Katherine Kimber: Definitely. I guess, though, some people do get told that Father Christmas isn’t true and then don’t get present.
Chris Sandel: So for them, they are suffering more at the hands of that new information. [laughs]
Katherine Kimber: Yeah, exactly. But no, you’re totally right. That’s not quite the same.
00:58:31
Chris Sandel: For me, if I’m thinking about where people get stuck or approach intuitive eating in an incorrect way, it’s where intuitive eating gets treated somewhat like a diet. There are rules about what is and isn’t intuitive eating. So if I’m craving vegetables, that’s intuitive eating; if I have my lunch and then I’m not hungry for 4 hours, that’s intuitive eating. There’s a really clear idea about what intuitive eating is. And then if I’m craving cake, that’s not intuitive eating, that’s emotional eating. Or if I eat a meal and then I’m hungry again, that’s not intuitive eating, that’s just because of boredom. That’s not real hunger, etc.
So it’s almost like I have this way of eating that I want to follow, and if my body naturally sends me those signals, then I’m doing intuitive eating, and if it’s not naturally sending these signals, then I clearly am not doing intuitive eating or intuitive eating doesn’t ‘work’. I think that’s often where people will find themselves. Which makes complete sense. If you’ve come from dieting for the last 5, 10, 20 years, then you’re so used to following rules and having good and bad and all of that kind of thinking. So you then read Intuitive Eating or you listen to a podcast about intuitive eating, and then you apply it in the way you’ve been applying dieting thinking for the last couple of decades.
Katherine Kimber: Yeah. Another one is “I’m not mindfully eating, therefore I’m not doing it properly because I’m not mindfully eating at every meal.” I think this is where intuitive eating in itself, whilst it is a brilliant tool – in a way, I wish intuitive eating didn’t have a label. I see intuitive eating as a toolkit to help someone get to a place of normal eating.
And if you think about, for example, the hunger-fullness scale, yes, initially for some people it might be helpful to put some sort of colour or number or bring some sort of awareness to the level of hunger they’re experiencing. I think there’s a need to practice and engage with that and find a way of bringing that into someone’s life so it does become a little bit more regular.
The hunger-fullness scale can be helpful for some people to help with that, but obviously we need to then come off of that. You don’t want to then be assessing at every single moment, “How hungry am I? How full am I? What number is that?” It needs to then become a lot more normal and natural and there needs to be a lot more flexibility around that. I think that’s where self-compassion can be really helpful and how we react and respond to when things don’t quite go as planned.
Just what ‘normal’ eating is as well, because normal eating does mean overeating at times and undereating at times and eating just because it tastes good or looks good or it’s fresh and it’s lovely now and it’s not going to be tomorrow. I think that’s where we have to be really careful at not turning this into a diet, and that’s where I think it’s a matter of exploring, what does intuitive eating mean to you? And is that realistic? Is that rules-based? Is that flexible?
Because there are periods of time – I think as well, diet culture sets this idea that if we’re not doing what is deemed to be mild diet-y behaviour, so maybe meal prepping on a Sunday or cooking from scratch every meal – some of these mild diet-y things can have more of an effect, even though they’re maybe mild behaviours, than we realise on our relationship with food. I think there is a risk of intuitive eating becoming a little bit of a mild diet-y tool.
Like a client realised recently – we were looking at needs and what’s going on in her life, and she’d had a particularly stressful week at work and felt bad for not having had a lot of food in her fridge and being as prepared as she normally is. I think what we’re trying to do with intuitive eating is raise the bar so that we’re getting you off the ground, so that you’re not feeling awful all the time in that relationship with food, but we’re raising the bar and there’s a line. But there’s still obviously ups and downs within that where some weeks you aren’t maybe eating in a way that’s feeling great for you because you’re managing so many other things that are going on in your life and you’re doing the best you possibly can.
So it’s normalising the fact that yes, some weeks you can cook from scratch or cook a recipe and get more enjoyment and have time around that. But other weeks – or maybe that’s not a priority for you and you do want to rely more on ready-made food, and that’s also totally fine. So it’s helping people break away from this idea that diet culture mildly teaches us that we have to find this one way and stick with it and meal prep every Sunday and be on top of it and always have food stocked and it be this really important thing, and just allowing people to have this flexibility in realising that we are human beings that change every week, every month, every year, and things come up where food is sometimes more of a priority, sometimes far less of a priority because other life things come up.
And that’s a conversation that I’m often having with people who feel like they’re failing at intuitive eating. I think that is also because of some of the stuff we see on social media around intuitive eating being co-opted into some sort of diet. Where is that information coming from?
One client recently as well said, “I just feel like I’m not there and I’m not doing well enough” and that was because she’d followed someone on social media who is very much Health at Every Size aligned and a Health at Every Size activist, but said something maybe a bit out of line, which was about she wasn’t feeling completely happy in her body and therefore – it was almost as if she put this idea of body happiness as the end goal. My client then came to me and said, “I read this from this professional, and I don’t feel like I’m there yet because I’m not happy in my body.”
So we had this whole conversation around that, but it kind of spun off of something that was seen on social media that was just a little bit off line. So yeah, I agree with you, that is a very common misconception.
Chris Sandel: Bringing the humanist to this – and when I’ve had conversations with Evelyn and Elyse, they are very much on board with this. They want people to be normal eaters. They understand that life is messy and that things are going to look different week to week.
The way I tend to think about intuitive eating is intuitive eating is learning how to walk again after you’ve been in an accident. So you’re doing things as part of that that are therapeutic, that are rehabilitation, that once you get to a stage where you can walk again, you don’t need to do because you just do them on autopilot. You don’t even have to think about them. You just are a normal walker. But in the beginning when you’re having to re-learn how to walk, you do have to break things down. You have to focus on things in a way that you wouldn’t otherwise have to. But it’s a stepping stone so that you then get to a place where this just happens naturally.
But I also am always talking to clients about the fact that there are times where meals are going to be more enjoyable and you have more time; there’s going to be meals that are completely functional, and it’s like you just need to get something in so you can get back to finishing off the emails or get to that meeting or whatever. So I don’t think it’s about creating this unrealistic expectation about every meal is going to be this Instagrammable type photo and that you’re going to be sitting in a relaxed setting with candles and deep breaths and all of that.
I am very much a realist with this, like sometimes things are going to be messy. What are the things that, even when the shit is hitting the fan and things are going badly, matter most in terms of food for you, that get you through those bad times? It’s like, “Okay, great, during that time I just ate loads of snack bars because they were the things I could get in my mouth quickly” or “I managed to buy some smoothie that I was able to drink between client calls because that was the only thing I could get in.” It’s like, great. There is time for damage minimization and then there’s time for “How do I really thrive?”
For me, that is a really big part of helping clients. And that is true even when someone is learning intuitive eating. Just because you’re learning intuitive eating, doesn’t mean that you get to then put your whole life on hold and all of the dramas and all of the stress goes away while you learn to do this thing. It’s like, no, you’re doing intuitive eating in the real world, not in some hermetically sealed vacuum.
Katherine Kimber: Yeah, and I hear that as well. “I’ll come back to intuitive eating when I’ve got this thing out of the way.” That’s always a red flag of, ooh, hang on a minute. No, this moves with you. This is part of self-care and prioritising. Like you said, some weeks it is just damage control and other weeks it is thriving a bit more.
01:08:54
I also sometimes use the stages of learning. When you talked earlier about – you alluded to this learning process. When anyone says to me, “I’m feeling a bit confused” or “This is really difficult”, I’ll share with them the four stages of learning.
The first stage is we’re in this state of being unconsciously incompetent. We don’t know what we don’t know, and we bumble along. Things might not feel great, but we probably feel alright.
Then we move to a state where we’re consciously incompetent, and this is like the red zone, which is really uncomfortable. We’re aware of stuff but we don’t know how to do it, or we’re trying to do it and we’re not doing it and we’re really stuck.
Then we move into a phase of being more consciously competent, so we’re more competent at doing some of those things but we have to really think about it before we move into a stage of that unconscious competence, where we’re just doing it. We get up, we brush our teeth, we get dressed. It’s the kind of thing we do every single day without thinking about it too much. But we all have to go through those stages of learning.
I think just normalising that discomfort of “This is tough. It requires some practice. I feel like I’m walking through mud sometimes and I’m not moving anywhere, but I’m just doing the same thing over and over.” That’s all great. That’s part of the learning, and that means you’re moving forward even though it doesn’t feel like it.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. Again, this is why or when or how acceptance and commitment therapy can be so helpful, where you’re able to say “Okay, I’m having these thoughts come up, I’m having these feelings come up” and learning how to see them as just thoughts and feelings. Like “I’m noticing that my mind is generating this thought” as opposed to “I am.” You’re giving yourself some distance here with the thoughts that are coming up. Just because a thought is occurring or a feeling is occurring, doesn’t mean that (a) you’re doing something wrong or (b) you believe that thing.
That is definitely going to be a challenge when you’re doing something new. It’s hard to be a novice at something because you’re like, “But I just want to be able to have proficiency. I want to be able to do this thing.” And especially if there’s some ambivalence around it where there is this “I don’t even know if I do want this thing. I don’t know if I want to walk away from dieting because there’s still a part of me that wants to lose weight or hopes I can lose weight. There’s still a big part of me that doesn’t necessarily trust my body.” There’s all of these components in there that make it more likely there’s going to be these thoughts and feelings that come up.
Again, bringing compassion to that and saying “This is how it’s meant to look. This isn’t an indication you’re doing something wrong. This is just what it feels like to change.”
Katherine Kimber: Yeah, definitely. It’s tough. It’s tough but it’s possible.
Chris Sandel: Yes. I agree with that.
01:12:05
Another one is in terms of where I think people get stuck with intuitive eating is lack of satisfaction. When I had an interview with Elyse Resch, she was talking about that when she did the teen book, she put satisfaction as the second principle. I think this is a big one in that people are often eating in a way that is unsatisfying, and a lot of that comes back to fear of weight gain or fear of too many calories or the things that they’ve learnt through previous diets.
If you’re not eating in a way that is truly satisfying, at some point that will catch up with you. Making satisfaction a real key part of your eating is very important. And again, you have to be realistic about this; it’s not going to happen at every single meal. But you can do it to some degree at every single meal. There are options that you can make it as satisfying as it can be, given what is available.
I think sometimes there’s a bit of a resistance to do that because the fear is “If I give myself more satisfying food, then the floodgates are going to open” or “Then I’m never going to stop eating” or fill in the blank. But despite the fear with it, what I notice with clients is when they are able to do that, with time, that is what really starts to give them freedom.
Katherine Kimber: Yeah. I think when those values and beliefs have been looked at more and we’ve looked at the dieting history, there’s that “I do want to do this” – and there’s always going to be back and forward with it, but yeah, exploring, adding other things into your most basic food. Even if it’s a tomato soup, actually having a really lovely either crunchy or soft roll with it or some cheese on top, just really making some of those simple things a little bit more exciting.
I think sometimes that can be a level of pseudo permission where it’s like, “Okay, I’m going to have some chocolate in my house”, but that chocolate is some form of, I don’t know, ‘healthy’ chocolate in some way.
Chris Sandel: 90% dark chocolate.
Katherine Kimber: 90% dark or something that maybe doesn’t feel as exciting or really what they want. And then the backlash is feeling completely out of control on what might be labelled as the kind of ‘cheap’ or ‘nasty’ chocolate. It’s almost like, yes, there may be something else contributing to that, but I’m sensing if you’re binging on ‘nice’ food, there’s an indication that you’re not getting a feeling of the food that you’re eating being nice. That’s where I’m really caught on listening out for the language that’s being used. The ‘nice’, the ‘treat’ food, the ‘healthy’, the ‘unhealthy’, all of that labelling indicates to me that food hasn’t been neutralized.
Sometimes I’ll get people to rate their meal on a scale of 1 to 10 of satisfaction. Where was it? Just using that as a bit of a tool at the meal to say, where were you at? Then if binging has happened later or out-of-control eating has happened somewhere later on, it can be quite a good reflective tool to look back and see, were you really satisfied?
Yeah, so I definitely see that as a core fundamental principle. I think as well, it’s not just about satisfaction with food, but also satisfying other needs as well. If someone’s feeling particularly negative, there’s a negative emotion coming up – maybe anxious or frustrated or judgmental – what we’ll look at is what’s underneath that? What’s missing here? What’s the missing need? And it might just be something’s come up at work or they need space or they need some air. I’ll actually pull up a whole list of needs and we look through that together to see, what is going on here?
A lot of what can underpin problematic eating is other missing human needs, basic human needs that we can look at a little bit together as well to satisfy those.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. It’s not just about the food. It’s about all aspects of life. And when life gets reduced to just being about weight and numbers and food, etc., then it is more likely that when life gets tough, the solution will be sought in that way – because that’s the only things that are going on and the only things that are thought about.
And I would say if a client’s talking about “I had a binge”, I’m always like, “Let’s really explore this. Let’s explore what you mean when you say a binge and what that means for you in terms of the kinds of foods, how it felt for you, but what was going on beforehand, what were the meals like beforehand?” Because the majority of the time when someone’s saying “I had a binge”, at least for the clients I’m working with, it’s like, what you had is your body telling you it needed more food because you have been undereating for what your body needs.
Katherine Kimber: Exactly. That word gets thrown around, doesn’t it?
Chris Sandel: It does, and it’s not that it just gets thrown around; it comes with a whole heap of baggage. ‘Binge’ is not a neutral word. It is a pejorative. So if we can start to then find some other, more neutral way of describing this – because in essence, your body is trying to save your ass because you’re not eating enough, and there’s been huge amounts of restriction that’s gone on either today, over the last couple of months, or, in a lot of people’s cases, for decades. Using a word like ‘binge’ is not actually an accurate description of what occurred if there’s all this baggage that comes along with that word.
So it’s like, “I ate food in response to restriction, and I ate more food or a large amount of food in response to restriction, and that makes complete sense given everything that has been occurring.” Language matters, so when this is coming up, I’m trying to have that conversation with clients. And look, they may still in their mind be like, “No, you don’t understand, it was a binge”, etc., but I want to at least start to have that conversation so they can start to at least get the impression of from my perspective, this is happening in response to restriction.
Even if they’re not fully on board with that as a concept, I want to be very steadfast and I want to be very unequivocal in that because there is a part of them that is probably understanding that, and there’s a big part of them that’s like “I don’t want to think that, I don’t want to look at that.” There is the ambivalence there. So I want to be very blunt without being blunt, but be like, “There is no unsureness in my assessment here. This is how I’m seeing it, and you can choose to see it differently, but I want you to know this is how I see it.”
Katherine Kimber: That makes a lot of sense. I think it’s also about – I find that mirroring that language initially before we then delve into – whether it be a splurge, a binge, out of control, whatever it is that they’ve described, we’ll address whatever we’re talking about in that session or whatever, but then it’s making sure we really delve into, what is binge eating? What is a binge? What’s the actual definition of this? What’s a subjective binge, what’s an objective binge? Like you say, unpicking all of those things I think is really important because it is a very loaded word and often used inappropriately.
Chris Sandel: Yeah.
Katherine Kimber: Yeah, I agree.
01:20:45
Chris Sandel: Another aspect that comes up with this as well is just a lack of trust in one’s body. I think that is really at the core of what intuitive eating is about. Like, how do we get you back in a trusting relationship with your body? And that’s the complete opposite of what dieting is. Dieting tells you your body cannot be trusted and this is why you need to follow these rules, and this is why you need to eat these foods and not these foods, because if you don’t do this, your body’s going to tell you to eat these bad foods.
Whereas intuitive eating really turns that on its head and is like, no, you can really trust your body. And that can be a really difficult thing for people to truly believe. It’s one thing to say, “I can kind of get this conceptually” or “Maybe that’s true for other people”, but for someone to feel that in themselves I think is a different story. Do you agree? If so, what is some of the stuff you can do to help with this?
Katherine Kimber: Yeah, I do feel like it feels very far-fetched, especially initially. I guess one of the first steps we might take towards building up more body trust, depending on where that individual is at, we might do a hunger body scan together in the session, see what comes up, see what’s noticed. That can be a very difficult thing for some people. Honestly, it’s not entirely appropriate to do that if someone has had an eating disorder or is in the midst of an eating disorder, but someone that’s been a chronic dieter, that is an appropriate thing to do.
Chris Sandel: I don’t know what a hunger body scan is. How does that work?
Katherine Kimber: What I might do is guide that person through a five-minute – it’s a bit almost like a meditation, but an active body scan in the session. It might involve closing the eyes or taking a soft gaze and shutting the outside world out, taking a few breaths, and then guiding them through all of the different places – the head, the mood, the energy levels, the stomach area, overall body sensations – to see what we can notice in terms of hunger at that present time. So I’m doing it in the session with someone. That in itself can be quite powerful. And then offering that reassurance of like “You can do this. Your body is behaving how it should be.” Sometimes that can be really helpful to do stuff like that in the session.
In terms of satisfaction and trust in what the body desires as well, again, if it feels appropriate and I feel like that person is able to go in and connect with their body, we might do an exercise around imagining being at an international buffet and all of the different foods there – the pizzas, the curries, the Chinese food, the salads, the fruits, the croissants, the bakery, all of those different things. Based on how you’re feeling in your body right now, what sort of food do you think you might be interested in? Hot, cold? Sweet, savoury? Just doing some of those practices in session.
Or it might be around naming other bodily sensations. For those that have found it really difficult to connect with hunger and fullness, we might even start with noticing bladder movements and responding to those. Tiredness and emotions and maybe where you might be able to pinpoint those in your body. Just really starting to build up a bit of a connection, of noticing in the body.
We might also, in terms of building up trust around food – quite often there can be fear around introducing certain foods into the diet or feeling guilty around eating certain foods. We might get someone to write a list of, what’s on your ‘problem food’ list or your ‘guilty food’ list? We’ll almost traffic light system them from green to amber to red and start with perhaps one of the foods that is really low down on that list that might feel a little bit more comfortable to go for.
Or it might not even be a new food. It might be a larger portion of a food that’s already being consumed, and just doing some reflection around that. We might do a bit of an eating exercise in the session together, noticing what comes up before, during, and after, and just practice perhaps introducing one new food that week, or breaking one rule. With a client yesterday, it was a rule of you should only have one hot meal a day. It was the rule that she felt most comfortable in breaking.
So we do a bit of an assessment of, what level of discomfort or challenge are you willing to take yourself to on a scale of 1 to 10 in the service of your values, what your desires are, what your vision is, what you want out of this work? So you’re leaning into that discomfort, but sometimes we’ve got other things going on in our life where we just need to stay and we don’t want to keep challenging ourselves.
Yesterday, this particular client said “I’m a 5 out of 10. I’m actually feeling quite good this week, and I want to take some action. What I want to do is I’m going to try and have two hot meals, because that’s one of the challenging things on my rules list, but it’s not as challenging as some of the other things.” So that’s something she’s going to go away, challenge herself with, reflect on, and we’ll see how that goes.
So really working with you where you’re at. I think when you’ve done it with one thing, it’s like, “Oh, okay, I’ve done that. That was alright. I survived it. Nothing bad particularly happened.” Or if it did, we work through that and bring it down. But a lot of the time people find it was okay. I think as people start to challenge that discomfort, they move up the list of the green, the amber, the red, and by the time the red’s come in, there’s so much confidence and trust in the body that those things become actually more of a green or an amber than a red.
So it really is a weaning process. You’re moving away from some of those old tools and really starting to practice building trust through lots of guidance and little exercises and that support, and just also that permission from a professional as well. Like, “It’s okay. You can do this. I’m giving you permission to eat this food this week.” That in itself can be really powerful.
It is a process. It does take time. I totally understand how it could be so scary for someone to be told to trust their body. It can feel so far-fetched and so out of reach. But it is an iterative building process that does take time, but it is possible.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. I think the way you’re talking about there where you can start to see, “I am able to move forward with this. What used to be scary is no longer scary. Actually, the feedback I’m getting is helpful from my body. I’m noticing that by doing this, I have more freedom around food, or I have more space to think about other things, or by doing this I’m now sleeping better or my digestion’s got better or my period’s come back” or whatever – I think being able to see how this is actually improving the body’s functioning can be useful.
But I also think for a lot of people, it doesn’t work so seamlessly like that, or at least in the beginning. So in a lot of ways, their fears come true, or at least come true in that moment. The fear is, “I can’t trust my body because if I eat the thing that it’s telling me to eat, I’m going to keep eating and keep eating.” And they then try that and that actually happens. They eat way more than they thought they wanted to eat or that they think they should eat. It can give them a sense of “See? I can’t trust my body. This is what happens when I try and trust my body.”
I think for me, with this kind of piece, it’s more than looking at an education of “Here’s how to understand the body.” I’ll often come back to the Minnesota Starvation Experiment – which if anyone’s interested, I’ve done a whole podcast on, or I’ve done many podcasts on, but I’ll link to the most recent one in the show notes – just looking at, this is what happened when, as part of that experiment – it was with 36 men and they were starved for a period of 26 weeks, and it’s well-documented what happened over that period and all the symptoms that arose. And then there’s documentation about what happened as they started to reintroduce food again in a restricted way and then reintroduce food in a completely unrestricted way and what happened in terms of their eating and their symptoms, etc.
Someone can then look at that and say, “Oh, okay, this is what happens when the body is restricted and then food is reintroduced. This is the natural order of things. This is what my body should be doing.” And again, I’m making it sound like it’s a really easy thing, you listen to this podcast and then everything’s fine, and that is definitely not the way that it is. But you can start to get to understand that “No, my body’s not broken, and even though it’s behaving in a way that if I had a magic wand I would stop it behaving, it is making sense from a physiological standpoint. This is what a body should be doing if it’s actually wanting to repair, and this is what happens, and we’ve got documentation that this is what happens. So even though this is going on, this is not an indication that I can’t trust my body. This is just an indication of this is the way that it heals.”
Katherine Kimber: Yeah, I’m totally with you on that. I think that’s where, as well – I think I made it sound as though “just do this and do this and then it’s easy”, but yeah, that education, layering in that self-compassion of this isn’t going to be a straight forward process, and some things are going to be – that natural response to deprivation and restriction is to feel out of control and be excited by this food. But yeah, almost then discussing ‘what if’ scenarios. So “What if you do eat this food and then it does involve this? What’s going to happen then?” Just worst-case scenario kind of planning.
But also, one thing that I do is frame that expectation that this may well happen, and that’s okay, and this is part of the recovery and the healing from that deprivation. But I think one thing we have to look out for is that pseudo permission of giving yourself permission to eat that food with the idea that you’re going to not want to eat that again or it’s not going to be enjoyable or you’re going to eat so much of that food that you’re no longer going to want it because you’re so sick of it. That can then get people a bit stuck.
But I do think if someone feels completely out of control and it throws them off and they have a massive eating episode that feels totally out of control, it may be that that was far too high up the list for them. But it really just depends on people’s journey and fears and level of disordered eating and how long this has gone on for and how scary the food is. It’s so variable with different people.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, I agree with that.
Katherine Kimber: You’ve come up with lots of different problems that people come up against with intuitive eating. I think you’ve hit all the key ones.
01:33:07
Chris Sandel: Cool. I know we are getting towards the end of our time together. The only other thing I wanted to ask about was I know you have, as part of your site, the Nude Nutrition Collective. Can you talk a little bit about that and what that’s about?
Katherine Kimber: Yeah. The Nude Nutrition Collective, I set up earlier actually this year, and that was really because I was working with clients and some of them felt they needed a bit more of a community, felt very alone in this work. It’s all very well me saying, “Oh, you can follow so-and-so on Instagram”, and I can reassure you that there are so many other people in the world going through these problems. Some people do just need that safe, supportive place where they can go. And I didn’t really know where to direct people, other than to podcasts and maybe some Facebook groups. But I couldn’t really monitor them and I might get some feedback from people saying, “This came up on there and it was really triggering for me.”
So I decided to create this Nude Nutrition Collective, which is an online non-diet community. There are two different sections to that. There’s the basic membership, which is free, and there’s an active community dashboard with other people that are either working with me to improve their relationship with food, fully-fledged anti-dieters or newbie intuitive eaters that are coming to this work. So there’s this community dashboard where you can post questions. I’m constantly monitoring that, and I can go in and remove and edit and change things if anything comes up that is problematic, which touch wood, I haven’t had so far.
We have monthly themes that might cover one of the principles of intuitive eating, or it might cover self-compassion or something around body image. What I’ll drop in there is some educational content once a month, whether it be an article or a coaching video or something. And then I’m in there responding to different questions. There’s an introduction, a webinar on intuitive eating to help people get started. It’s just a safe place to go for a bit of extra support.
But then I also have the paid version, which is £14.99, £15 a month. So you’ve got the monthly themes, the community dashboard, but what we also have is more educational content. Every week, I’ll be putting in there a coaching video, an article, or a worksheet. We have a monthly meetup where we tend to take the topic of the monthly theme and you get to meet other people that are going through the same sort of journeys and all really support and help each other.
I sometimes bring in experts from outside to deliver a guest workshop or meetup or training. I also have a 1:1 drop-in clinic as well that I’ve just started offering in there so that once a month, I’m there for an hour and you can come in and ask me anything, and I’m there to offer support.
So two different options, and all of the information about that is on my website. Hopefully it’s a safe space to go to, to get that additional community support for people that are working through improving their relationship with food and their body.
Chris Sandel: Nice. That’s really, really cool. And I think you’re right; there’s so much of a feeling of “I’m doing this on my own. Either no-one else is struggling with what I’m struggling, or there are so few people who understand what Health at Every Size is or intuitive eating is or those kinds of concepts.” So it can be really isolating, and it can feel like it’s ‘me versus the world’. So to be able to have a place where you can go and ask questions and hear other people going through the same stuff you’re going through, I think that is really, really helpful for people.
And it’s tough these days – I think there was a period where there was lots of really great Facebook groups that I would recommend people would go to and be members of, and I have personally stepped away from all social media. But even the groups that I used to think were helpful, I’m now really dubious of. It in a lot of ways feels like a dumpster fire. So I’m like, I don’t really have a lot of places to recommend people to go where there is that group feeling and I feel safe that it’s not going to completely denigrate into a swamp.
Katherine Kimber: Yeah. I think what’s so amazing in there is the key people that participate in there, that are really active, are actually current or past clients. So they are so supportive, and also so knowledgeable, that sometimes I’m like, “Wow, I’m just going to let you help each other because you’ve got far more knowledge than I do.” [laughs] Or they’ve got some great ideas on things when people are having problems, because they’ve gone through it, they’re doing it themselves. Everyone has different lived experiences and different bodies.
I watch some of the things that have been written and it just makes my heart feel full because I’m like, “Wow.” It’s really lovely to have those real ambassadors in there that are just responding and supporting and genuine. And so much of it is rooted in self-compassion and listening and just really, really lovely people. I’ve got about 150 people in there now, so it’s a lovely little group.
Chris Sandel: That’s great. That is really good. So where can people be finding out more about you? Where do you want to point them? It can be website, social media, all of that, and I’ll put it in the show notes.
Katherine Kimber: The main place is really my website, which is https://nudenutritionrd.com. That is N-U-D-E as in nude, and ‘RD’ at the end stands for registered dietitian. That Nude Nutrition was really, originally when I created this business, about stripping the nonsense, stripping back. It might be something that I change in the near future, because whenever I say to people my business name, there is an element of feeling uncomfortable with saying ‘Nude Nutrition’ to GPs. [laughs] Anyway, that’s what it is for now. And my handle on Instagram is also the same, @NudeNutritionRD. You can find me in both of those places.
Chris Sandel: Perfect.
Katherine Kimber: All the community stuff is on my website, and information about 1:1 support as well, and courses, which I run occasionally.
Chris Sandel: Cool. I recommend people check all of that out, and thank you so much for coming on and having a conversation today. It’s been great.
Katherine Kimber: Thank you. I really appreciate you having me. I feel very privileged with all of the amazing guests that you have on your podcast.
Chris Sandel: Nice.
Katherine Kimber: Thanks, Chris.
Chris Sandel: That was my conversation with Kat Kimber. I think she’s doing great work with helping clients with intuitive eating and healing their relationship with food.
One thing I wish I had mentioned in this episode is that relearning intuitive eating is really a difficult process. I love the Intuitive Eating book and the workbook, and these contain huge amounts of information and guidance, but often this information alone is not enough. It really does help to have someone there to support you and guide you through the process, because it is scary, and there’s lots of second-guessing and lots of fear and grief as part of making these changes.
So if you are trying intuitive eating on your own and you’re finding it too much or like it’s not working for you while you’re attempting it on your own, then please do get in contact. You can head over to www.seven-health.com/help for more information, or you can reach out to Kat at https://nudenutritionrd.com.
So that’s it for this week’s show. I will catch you again soon.
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