Welcome to an inspiring episode of the Embodied Nourishment Podcast, featuring the badass certified strength and conditioning specialist, Coach Jess Burke who also has a masters in kinesiology. This episode dives deep into reshaping our relationships with exercise without sacrificing our relationship with food. Come with us as we move away from diet culture and towards a more balanced and holistic approach to exercise.

Coach Jess shares her personal journey and professional expertise, emphasizing the importance of understanding the synergy between nutrition and exercise. Together, we explore the misconceptions surrounding fitness and diet, dismantling the harmful ideologies that have been ingrained in us from a young age.

If you're struggling with the intimidating world of workouts and want to find joy in moving your body, this episode offers valuable insights and practical advice to help you transform your relationship to movement. You can find Coach Jess directly on Instagram @coachjburke and click the link in her bio to get started on working with her directly!

Welcome to the Embodied Nourishment Podcast! In this episode, join me as I delve into the complexities surrounding weight loss, the anti-diet movement, and disordered eating recovery. I share my personal journey as a registered dietitian and offer eye-opening insights into the missing nuance in diet culture discussions.

Discover why extreme calorie restriction can harm your metabolism and learn about the significant role of basal metabolic needs in achieving your healthiest weight. Whether you're caught in a cycle of dieting and binging or stuck in perpetual restriction, this episode provides practical strategies to nourish your body, respect your hunger, and find balance without obsession.

If you're tired of living in a constant state of food anxiety, tune in to explore how to live a vibrant life while maintaining a healthy relationship with your body and food. Plus, get all the exciting details about my upcoming group coaching program designed to help you break free from the dieting mindset and embrace a life of sustained nourishment and freedom.

Join the group program FUELED AND FREE here: Fueled and Free

Questions about whether or not it's the right fit for you? DM me on Instagram @embodied.nourishment or send me an email to melissa@thesaltydietitian.net

A little while ago I had been thinking about my different experiences working as a Registered Dietitian. And I can say that the most frustrating area I ever worked was my short time spent as a Lactation Consultant.

Babies are the most intuitive feeders. And breastfeeding can be so easy if one were truly able to surrender to the lead of their baby. But it’s our own expectations and rigidity and food rules that project and get in the way, usually making it a stressful and miserable experience.

I would try to ease mothers’ concerns about their newborn needing to eat every 20-45 minutes by showing them that their baby’s stomach is only the size of a marble. A marble sized stomach will fill very quickly and will also empty very quickly. It’s normal for them to need to feed every 20-45 minutes. It didn't mean they weren't producing enough milk.

It was so frustrating to experience mothers unable to simply accept this as fact. They wanted their baby on a strict schedule eating the same amount at the same time every single day. The lack of trust in one’s body and of their baby’s body was never more apparent in these moments. Mothers would give up, switch to formula and try to shove 4 ounces of formula into a marble sized stomach.

The baby would then spit up most of it and I would sit there and listen to the mother suspect that their baby had a milk-protein allergy. While milk-protein allergies in babies exist, they are actually quite rare. Most of the time it isn’t an allergy. It’s just simply the case that you can not shove 4 ounces of liquid inside of a marble.

I’ve watched mothers waste thousands of dollars on “special” formula because of this suspected allergy when all that needed to happen was slower, reduced, more frequent feedings. I would get told “yeah but it helped reduce the spit up.”

Yes, because babies stomachs grow pretty quickly and in just a few months, they can hold more milk for a longer periods of time. This will happen with breastmilk, regular formula, or super expensive formula.

There’s another point I’d like to make. Let me ask you this...

How many times a day do you pick up a water bottle to take a quick little drink? For the first 6 months of life, breastmilk or formula is everything to a baby. It is their food and their water. Sometimes they don’t want a whole feeding. Sometimes they just want a “sip of water.”

So if you latch your baby and they only take a few sips then unlatch, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you aren’t producing enough milk. They might have just wanted a “sip of water.”

I understand that we live in a world that does not privilege mothers to operate at the whim of their babies. We ourselves are on strict schedules so it’s much easier to have our babies conform to us, than us to them.

All of this to say, my time as a lactation consultant made me realize that the disembodiment of body trust started with the adults. Not the babies. And that’s why I shifted to working with adults and their relationships to food.

In this episode, I dive deeper into body trust through the lens of feeding our babies.

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Work with me here: Click here!

I know you hate your body and you think that weight loss will make you love it, so you restrict HARD.

But a malnourished brain is a brain that can’t perceive things accurately, so the image of yourself becomes increasingly distorted.

And then whatever body changes you do experience might make you feel better in some ways, but deep down it doesn’t solve everything.

So you might try a different diet...and then a different diet...and then a different diet...etc...

All the while body image never really improves, or worse yet, it gets more dysmorphic.

Rehabilitating your nutrition intake is the number one, most important part of body image recovery.

As long as you fear adequate nourishment, you will continue to live in fear of your body.

This might sound cliche BUT the only way to get over your fear is to face your fear.

In the cases of severe eating disorders, nutrition rehabilitation is paramount in recovery. In hospital settings, work with a dietitian is prioritized even over the work with a therapist. There are some individuals who can fully heal their eating disorders without ever seeing a therapist, as long as they stay steadfast in their work with their dietitian. (Not throwing shade to ED therapists you guys rock and are totally needed! I know you know that some people are just resistant to therapy or decline it and they can still go a long way on their own). All of this to say, even if you don’t claim a full blown eating disorder, even if your relationship with food is just slightly disordered…you can not underestimate the power of adequate nutrition in feeling better on a holistic level. It is paramount in healing the mind, body, and soul all together. We can talk alllllll dayyyy longgggg about core beliefs and not feeling good enough or worthy or deserving of love and your childhood trauma and your trauma responses etc etc etc BUT Until you start to finally commit to adequate nourishment, the neurons in your brain that fire together to produce body dysmorphia will NEVER heal. They will NEVER rewire to a positive self image as long as you are engaging in restrictive thoughts and behaviors. This is precisely why I named my nutrition counseling program “Nourish to Flourish.” Nutrition is the most important step 💕

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Join Nourish to Flourish here: 1:1 Coaching

If you've been trying intuitive eating and you feel like it is not working to bring you the peace and health you are looking for, I am going to tell you why right now...

The practice and principles of intuitive eating are IDEALISTIC. They are the end goal. But the end goal is not always the means to that end. Yes it sounds IDEAL to trust your hunger and fullness and to not have any food rules, BUT if you have a bunch of internalized rules that dictate your life, it's damn near impossible to adopt intuitive eating just because you want to.

Becoming an intuitive eater takes hard and challenging work. You have to actively and intentionally implement a nutrition practice that DIRECTLY challenges your food rules head on. For example, if you believe that you are only allowed to eat carbohydrates once per day, then you need a nutrition prescription that includes eating carbohydrates 3-4 times per day. And this must be followed every day for at least 6 weeks before your body starts to connect with carbohydrates and give you clear somatic feedback on how they make you feel.

While intuitive eating sounds like a walk in the park, the process of getting there is anything but that. It's emotional, it's challenging, and the experience of coming back home into your body is vulnerable. But it's also the most empowering thing you will ever do.

In today's podcast episode I dive deeper into why intuitive eating might not be working for you and I give you step by step instructions on how you can start to make it work for you, FOR REAL.

Find me on Instagram @embodied.nourishment

Work with me 1:1 here

"I want to lose weight because I am just so uncomfortable in my body."

Raise your hand if you've said these words!

What if I told you that there was a way to learn how to be comfortable in the body that you are in right now?

And what if I told you that your resistance to learning this comfort is not protecting your health like you think it is?

I know what you are thinking. You're sitting there saying "If I learn how to be comfortable with the body I have right now then I'm afraid I'm going to continue gaining weight."

I know you think that shame and judgment about your body are going to be the things that motivate you to lose weight or be healthier, but the truth is that shame and judgment are the very things that are keeping you stuck in the cycle of disordered eating.

There is a way to be kind to yourself, feel comfortable with where you are at, AND achieve your health goals.

In this podcast episode, I show you exactly how to do this.

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Work with me 1:1 by clicking here

If you don’t eat a 700 calorie cheeseburger because you think it’s unhealthy but then proceed to eat a bunch of “healthy” stuff devoid of the essential proteins, fats, and nutrients that your body was craving in the cheeseburger, bringing your total calorie intake to 1,200….why do you keep doing that?

So many times people will express to me that they eat so healthy but can’t understand why they keep gaining weight. Well guess what, if you’re constantly denying your cravings, which is your body’s way of trying to communicate to you what it needs, and instead you’re forcing yourself to eat foods that your body actually isn’t look for and doesn’t need, then of course your weight and appetite homeostasis is going to be way off.

You have plenty of room in your diet to get all the vitamins and minerals your body needs and still have room for something like a cheeseburger. Not everything you ingest needs to be jam packed with vitamins and minerals. Your body also needs major macronutrients like protein and fat (cheeseburger).

Your cravings aren’t trying to deceive you. Your body is very smart. It regulates your heart rate, respiration rate, and body temperature, and it can also perfectly regulate your appetite and cravings as well if you decide to finally TRUST it.

In this episode, I dive into your sense of interoceptive awareness and show you how to prioritize satisfaction so that you can stop obsessing over food, achieve health, and be free to move on with your life.

Follow me on Instagram @embodied.nourishment

Email inquiries to melissa@thesaltydietitian.net

Work with me 1:1 by clicking here

Relationships that are characterized by control and manipulation stem from a lack of trust. When we are in a relationship with someone we don't trust, we tend to deploy our controlling side. This might look like creating rules to follow, invading the other person's privacy by going through their things, and picking fights.

What does your relationship with food look like? Is that relationship also characterized by control and manipulation? Similar to controlling relationships with other people, controlling relationships with food ALSO stems from a lack of trust. But this lack of trust instead stems from a lack of trust for ONESELF.

When you don't trust yourself with food you may deploy food rules and regulations such as:

1. no eating after 7pm
2. no more than 1,600 calories per day
3. only one serving of bread allowed each day
4. must exercise at least 5 days per week

I know you think that one day you can food-rule your way into peace and freedom with food, but reflect...has following diets and food rules every brought you peace or has it only made you more obsessed and anxious?

The way to actually arrive at peace and freedom around food is to work on the relationship that you have with yourself and to learn how to develop trust for yourself.

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Work with me 1:1 by clicking here