What Are Your Attunement Disruptors?

People are often surprised that I don’t tell my clients what to eat, when to eat, or how much to eat. I don't because I don’t have a clue what their body needs and wants at any given time. They are the expert of their body, not me!

My role is to help my clients connect with their body’s innate wisdom and trust it to guide them to the most nourishing, satisfying and supportive choices for their unique being. Part of this process includes exploring their attunement disruptors.

Attunement Disruptors
Attunement disruptors are obstacles that interfere with your ability to clearly hear—and appropriately respond to—the messages your body is sending you, including its sensations of hunger and fullness and feelings of pleasure and satisfaction. Here are a few common ones:

• Dieting: When you’re on a diet—whether it’s Weight Watchers, Whole30 or Paleo—you prioritize a set of external rules over your internal cues (e.g., denying your hunger because you’ve reached your calorie allotment for the day; avoiding a pleasurable food because it’s not allowed).
   
• Food Rules: As with diet programs, your personal food rules (e.g., no eating after 7 p.m., no snacking, no seconds, no carbs) dictate your food choices rather than your body’s needs and desires.
   
• Distracted Dining: Eating while multitasking (e.g., TV watching, emailing, texting, driving, cleaning) inhibits your ability to tune into your body’s feedback.
   
• Eating Habits: Ingrained habits, like skipping breakfast, inflexible meal times and a clean-your-plate mentality, can override your body’s needs.
   
• Performative Eating: You’re disconnected from your body when you change how you eat when eating with others. You might do this to meet social or cultural expectations, please other people, or project a certain image.   
   
• Inadequate Self-Care: Not prioritizing foundational daily self-care practices, such as restorative sleep, joyful movement, stress relief and screen-free time, makes it difficult to hear and respond to messages from your body.

Start Small
Addressing obstacles to body attunement can take time, especially if your inner wisdom is clouded by a dieting mentality, food rules, internalized weight stigma and other deeply embedded beliefs and behaviors. Start small and get support if needed.

Removing your disruptors will help you reconnect with your body and become more aware of and responsive to its messages, needs and desires. As a result, you will cultivate a more trusting, peaceful and relaxed relationship with food and your body.

7 Peace-Making Spring Cleaning Tips

With the arrival of spring, you may have the urge to do a little spring cleaning.

If one of your desires is to make peace with food and your body, here are seven spring cleaning tips that will help you on your journey.

1. Toss out your dieting books. Beyond books on popular diet programs, like Paleo, Keto and Whole30, this includes any books on clean eating, detoxing, cleansing, eliminating, fasting, etc.
    
2. Unsubscribe from magazines and newsletters and delete bookmarks for websites and blogs that feature weight-loss and dieting articles and promote the thin ideal.
    
3. Unfollow, unlike or hide any social media pages and feeds that focus on the thin ideal, thinspiration, fitspiration, weight loss, diet culture, before-and-after stories, etc.
    
4. Throw away your scale. It’s time to stop playing the numbers game and letting a piece of junk dictate how you feel about and treat yourself. It's time to take back your power.
    
5. Remove any calorie/gram/point-counting apps from your phone and other devices.
    
6. Donate your clothes that don’t fit well or make you feel fabulous.
    
7. Ditch any weight-loss supplements, pills, powders and potions.

While these actions can feel a little daunting and scary at first, when my clients follow through with even just a few of them, they feel liberated, empowered and energized far more than they ever imagined. I bet the same will be true for you, too.

It's Not Your Fault

Over the years, I’ve heard many similar versions of the following story.

“I’ve tried every diet under the sun. Weight Watchers, Atkins, South Beach, Whole 30, Paleo, Keto—you name it. And I’ve failed at every single one.

I’ll be good for a few days or weeks, sometimes months, and then I rebel or something happens and I can’t stick with it anymore. I fall off the wagon, eat whatever I’m not supposed to be eating, regain the weight I lost, often more, and feel guilty, ashamed, angry and disappointed.

I simply don’t have enough willpower and self-discipline. I can’t control myself. I need to try harder.”

Misdirected Blame
When we can’t adhere to a diet plan, we often go into self-blame and shame.

Rarely, do we blame the plan.

We don’t stop to consider that perhaps the plan has failed us.

We don’t point at the plan and ask: Is this flexible enough for my life? Does it honor my needs and preferences? Is it practical? Is it sustainable? Is it satisfying? Is it pleasurable? Is it kind?

Instead, we blame ourselves then go look for a new diet to feel better, to feel in control, to regain a sense of hope. It’s totally understandable. Diet culture has conditioned us to think and act this way.

In fact, the only winner in this vicious cycle is the $66 billion diet industry—an industry that has a 95 percent failure rate yet thrives on repeat customers.

The inability to stick with a diet is not your fault. Diets aren’t designed for long-term success.

Reclaim Your Power
The good news is, you can reclaim your power. You can exit the dieting cycle at any moment and return to the intuitive eater you came into this world as.

You can relearn how to listen to your innate body wisdom and trust it to guide you toward the most nourishing, pleasurable and sustainable choices for your unique being. 

It’s not a quick fix. It's a pathway to freedom.