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Mindful Eating Made Easy

Mindful Eating Made Easy - Tips for Mindful Eating

Why Celebrating National Nutrition Month is So Hard in 2021

Celebrating National Nutrition Month highlights the fun and enjoyment that nourishing the body offers. Each March, countless people are encouraged to ‘eat right’ to be healthy. While I empathize with the intention, the pandemic has made it hard not to see the health inequity that grips our country....

The Patient Always Has The Answers

Patients have said to me, “My PCP thinks that I overeat, but I am not overeating. They think that I am not exercising or that I am lazy. They just don’t believe me, and it is frustrating because they stop listening.” Poor communication is often at the heart...

D.E.B-D Looking at the Long-Term Impact of Weight-Centered Care

If you are like many professionals you might not have considered the long-term impact of a weight stigma or a weight centered approach to diabetes and how this might impact diabetes care. Research shows that the long‐term result is avoidance and postponement of care, which has a significant...

Weight Stigma: The Common Denominator in Disordered Eating in Diabetes

To understand what makes DEB-D escalate, we must begin by understanding how weight stigma, DEB and diabetes are connected. This begins with some very basic definitions about weight stigma and how it impacts diabetes care. What is Weight Stigma? Weight stigma is the prejudice and discrimination towards higher...

Researcher’s Wisdom – Quotes regarding the harm associated with DEB-D

Learning more about DEB – D begins with a key article by Deborah L. Young-Hyman and Catherine L. Davis titled Disordered Eating Behaviors in Individuals with Diabetes. This review article was published in 2010 in the Diabetes Care Journal, which reviews over 100 journal articles. Here are some quotes from this...

Weight Stigma and Diabetes Care – A client story

Kim came into my office and after a short pause explained that she wanted to lower her A1C because she was going to have fertility treatments to have a baby. It was an exciting decision for Kim and after many years of trying, this 38-year woman explained, it...

Set Anti-goals to Prevent Being Overwhelmed

We’ve all been trained in creating S.M.A.R.T goals, and if you have been following me, you know that S.M.A.R.T goals aren’t always helpful. Sometimes being too specific distracts you from identifying and refining your deeper intention. Yep, you’ve been there, and you want to keep your goals simple because simple goals...

Six Steps to Use the Thought Compass for Business

The heart of mindful eating is developing the ability to listen to your own inner wisdom. This is typically done in meditation by being quiet, slowing down and noticing what arises for you. In business, there are big benefits that come from engaging in regular reflection. But because...

What is the difference between a CDE and a CDCES?

Healthcare professionals are unaware that diabetes educators, myself included, have had a change in their credentials. The term CDE now signifies a Certified Diabetes Care and Education Specialist. While this is a bit of a mouthful, the name change better captures what a CDE (or should I say,...

You Can’t See Disordered Eating

Identifying disordered eating isn’t as simple as asking if a person ate this or didn’t eat that. Identifying disordered eating requires us to look at both the motivation, fears, and behaviors surrounding food. The followig examples of eating disorder screening questions will give you a sense of how...

What Changed When I Became A Weight Neutral Diabetes Professional

“How are you different?” is a question many professionals ask me, regarding my decision to provide weight neutral diabetes care. While clients often comment meeting with me was “not what I expected,” appointments with a weight neutral diabetes educator share the same end goal as a traditional diabetes education...

Uncovering Intention: How OEQs can help

Creating a connection with your clients is easy when they share their deeper desires. It’s lovely when our job as educators and coaches are straight forward yet, what do we do when the client isn’t able to tell us what is wrong or what they want to work...

The Bad, The Good, and the Not Effective.

Open-ended questions are a way to obtain information from a client that prevents a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response. For example, “Did you eat breakfast?” isn’t an open-ended question but “What did you have for breakfast?” is a better-phased question and in MI, using OEQ’s whenever possible is the...

When Politics and Professions Collide

The Weight-neutral Self-assessment offers four categories starting with weight-centered, moving to a weight-neutral stance, expanding to weight-inclusive, and ending with a weight-liberated view. Many professionals may incorrectly assume that the last category, weight-liberated is the same as Health At Every Size, HAES. Health At Every Size is identified...

Working with Disordered Eating in a Weight-neutral Way

Many professionals are shocked to learn that research estimates that up to 40% of people with type 2 diabetes have disordered eating patterns and even more suffer from chronic dieting. How can you, as a weight-neutral professional assist them to create peace with food and with elevated blood...

A Self-assessment Tool to Help You Step Out of Diet Culture

Being nonjudgmental allows you, the professionals, to see the charlatan and separate fact from fiction. You know that the latest health fads lack the necessary research to prove that its effective. The persuasive argument, promising results, are hard to resist if your client believes that it fixes what...

My Resolution is Offering Weight-neutral Diabetes Care!

Its that time of year when clients come to see you, energized to change. As a weight-neutral educator, how do you navigate the annual desire to lose weight? The following is a fictitious dialog using Motivational Interviewing to illustrate how to remain nonjudgmental when your clients want to...

The Weight-neutral Self-assessment: A tool to help you explore your own views on weight and weight-loss

It was more than five years ago that I sat across from Mary at lunch. We had snuck out from the Food Nutrition Expo Conference to have lunch at Legal Seafood. Our view of Boston harbor on that warm October day seemed to frame our shared passion for...