Cultivating a Peaceful, Non-Diet Relationship with Food... with Katie Schmidt

The Art of Health™ by Rob Bee

Weight is not the only indicator of how healthy you are.

Are you guilty of emotional eating?

Do you want to improve your connection with food and your body so you can live in a more peaceful way?

Listen to this episode as Katie guides you on your way.

Katie Schmidt is the Founder of Whole Nourishment, a platform where she helps people deal with their food relationship. She is a Behavioural Food Therapist and supports clients globally to cultivating a peaceful relationship with food, mind and body. Katie blends training in eating, psychology, holistic nutrition, mental health, and mindfulness to help clients adopt perspectives and practices for eating and living in an intentional and intuitive way.

In this episode, Katie talks about the disconnection that’s been happening with people and their body. She shares insights about people leaning on food to meet non-food needs, and the problems that causes. Here, she discusses ways to achieve good connection by knowing what you feel and what you need. She also shows us a resource to guide you in overcoming emotional eating.

What you will learn from this episode:

• Learn why you’re getting disconnected with your body and what you can do to get back
• Know why it is important for you to understand what you feel and what you need in order to live a healthier lifestyle
• Discover ways on how you can practice making your self-and-body connection better without leaning on food for non-food needs

“Understanding how we feel makes it easier to know what we need to do. A lot of times, we reach for food to get non-food needs met. So, when we identify what we feel, we can identify what we really need.” – Katie Schmidt

Valuable Free Resource:

Visit Katie’s website at https://www.wholenourishment.net/blog/how-to-overcome-emotional-eating for a free guide to overcome emotional eating.

Topics Covered:

02:39 – The biggest challenge people face as they age with regard to staying fit, healthy, and positive: (1) Being disconnected to ourselves and our body and (2) the diet mentality.

05:02 – The common mistakes or misconceptions people have about solving that problem of being out of touch: (1) We focus on weight as the best indicator for our health and (2) we believe that a tighter grip will give us more willpower and discipline.

08:01 – The number one tip; a tangible specific action that people could implement right away: (1) Create quiet space in your day to pause, reflect, and reconnect and (2) Ask yourself about your feelings and needs.

11:03 – Free resource: Katie’s website: https://www.wholenourishment.net and https://www.wholenourishment.net/blog/how-to-overcome-emotional-eating

Takeaways:

“We all have a unique experience as we age, but as humans, we don't do well with change. It makes us feel very uncomfortable and we feel like our bodies spelled us, or we're not good enough or we're doing something wrong.” – Katie Schmidt

“When we trust more something outside of us than our own selves and body and emotions, we operate from this place of fear, disconnection, distrust, and that just perpetuates that negative feedback loop in the way that we relate to food, body, ourselves, and our mind. And that leads to food guilt and fear, preoccupation, emotional eating, and that takes a huge toll on us on our physical health. It kind of adds to that stress load, that the nervous system level, our immunity, and our digestion, but it also takes a toll on our mental and emotional well-being.” – Katie Schmidt

“We focus on weight as the best indicator for our health, but we know though in research that we can be healthy in larger bodies and we can be unhealthy in smaller bodies. Weight is not the best indicator. We want to be looking at our health from this more holistic perspective of not just physical health and weight, but also our mental health and emotional well-being, our connection with ourselves, with others, the quality of our relationships with nature, and with the environment around us.” – Katie Schmidt

“We believe that in order to get to a better place, we have to tighten our grip, we have to be more disciplined and have more willpower, but in reality, it's counterintuitive, but we actually want to loosen our grip. We want to be more flexible and responsive and adaptive and permissive.” – Katie Schmidt

“Create quiet space in your day to pause, to reflect, and reconnect, because our challenges – disconnection, being in our head, looking at things outside of ourselves for solutions, for answers, not trusting ourselves – we want to interrupt that autopilot were on in our days of kind of being reactive. Creating this quiet space to pause and reflect can help to kind of interrupt autopilot.” – Katie Schmidt

Connect with Katie Schmidt:

• Website: https://www.wholenourishment.net and https://medium.com/@wholenourishment/
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/schmidtk11
• Instagram: @whole.nourishment

Connect with Rob Bee:

• Website: https://theartofhealth.fit/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-bee-a809a061/