Intuitive Eating for Life: How Mindfulness Can Deepen and Sustain Your Intuitive Eating Practice

by Jenna Hollenstein MS, RD, CDN

Overview

For anyone who struggles with food, eating, and body image, Intuitive Eating for Life presents easy and effective mindfulness skills to enhance, sustain, and deepen your intuitive eating practice!

Intuitive eating is a great way to get off the diet roller coaster, stay healthy, build confidence in your body, and take the guesswork out of mealtime. But if you’re like many people, you may have trouble staying on track. Enter mindfulness! Based on the popular anti-diet book program, Intuitive Eating, renowned nutrition therapist and meditation teacher Jenna Hollenstein provides powerful mindfulness tools to help you find stability, discover self-awareness, and self-regulate—so you can respect your body and honor your health.

In this step-by-step guide, you’ll learn to practice intuitive eating using the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, a classic Buddhist framework. The Four Foundations include:

• Mindfulness of body, in which you will examine how the body awareness enhances your ability to practice the principles of intuitive eating—honor your hunger, respect your fullness, and exercise.  
• Mindfulness of feeling, in which you will explore the ways that mindfulness and meditation can provide stability and self-awareness, allowing you to experience the full spectrum of your emotions in real time.
• Mindfulness of mind, in which you will examine your own beliefs and misconceptions about eating and the body and respond to them with compassion
• Mindfulness of dhammas (or phenomena), in which you will learn how phenomena such as the impermanence of life can shift our focus from improving our bodies to caring for them.

 

Using these simple and easy-to-remember foundations, you’ll discover that you can easily stay on track with your intuitive eating path, and actually improve it for better health and overall well-being. So, what are you waiting for?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781684039401
Publisher:	New Harbinger Publications
Publication date:	12/01/2022
Pages:	216
Sales rank:	203,247
Product dimensions:	9.00(w) x 6.10(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Jenna Hollenstein, MS, RD, CDN, is a nutrition therapist, meditation teacher, and author of five books. Her work combines intuitive eating, trauma-sensitive mindfulness, polyvagal theory, and other embodied modalities. Her work has been featured in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Self, Health, Lion’s Roar, Mindful, Vogue, Elle, Glamour, Women’s World, and U.S. News & World Report. Jenna lives in the greater New York City, NY, area.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 Mindfulness Is a Form of Self-Care and Respect 11

Part I Mindfulness of Body

Chapter 2 How Mindfulness Affects Your Body 23

Chapter 3 Hunger 35

Chapter 4 Fullness 47

Chapter 5 Satisfaction, the Center of the Framework 59

Chapter 6 Movement 75

Part II Mindfulness of Feelings

Chapter 7 The Biology of Emotion 93

Chapter 8 Tending to Emotional Hunger 109

Chapter 9 Finding Peace with Food 127

Part III Mindfulness of Mind

Chapter 10 How Mindfulness Affects Your Thoughts 145

Chapter 11 Cultivating Self-Compassion 155

Chapter 12 Transforming Specific Diet Mentality Thoughts 161

Part IV Mindfulness of Phenomena

Chapter 13 How You Do Anything Is How You Do Everything 177

Chapter 14 The Power of Showing Up 195

Conclusion 199

Acknowledgments 201

Notes 203

Editorial Reviews

Intuitive eating should be easy and straightforward—right? Often, this is not the case. Yet, we shouldn’t give up on intuitive eating, as it enhances well-being. Instead, we need practices that support it. You’ll find this support within Hollenstein’s book. Stocked with mindfulness practices and information, this brilliant book will help deepen and sustain your intuitive eating path and build trust and confidence in your body.”
—Tracy Tylka, PhD, professor of psychology at The Ohio State University, Intuitive Eating Scale developer, and editor of Body Image

Tracy Tylka

Bravo, Intuitive Eating for Life! I wholeheartedly agree there is undeniable freedom available to us when we embrace the present moment, allowing us not only to celebrate each and every meal before us, but the life-affirming nourishment our souls receive as well.”
—Emme, mother, model, social disrupter, coauthor of Chicken Soup for the Soul: Curvy and Confident, and founder of www.truebeautyfoundation.org

Emme

Relatable, practical, and filled with honesty, Intuitive Eating for Life enlists powerful mindfulness techniques to help us think about the way we approach food from an intuitive and nonrestrictive place. The ‘mindful moments’ sprinkled throughout the book help you tangibly find ways to apply these techniques to your everyday life without feeling overwhelmed!”
—Bethany C. Meyers, founder and CEO of the be.come project, and advocate for body neutrality

Bethany C. Meyers

What a gift to have a book that complements Intuitive Eating, while also bringing meaning to why mindfulness and intuitive eating are so interconnected. Jenna Hollenstein takes intuitive eating from its self-care framework and weaves it into a practice that is sustained through a dedication to mindfulness, acceptance, and self-compassion. Through thought-provoking questions and exercises, she guides the reader down a path that brings unconscious perceptions into conscious awareness, ultimately leading to decreased stress and increased well-being. This book is a gem!”
—Elyse Resch, MS, RDN, CEDS-S, nutrition therapist, coauthor of Intuitive Eating, and author of The Intuitive Eating Workbook for Teens

Elyse Resch

In Intuitive Eating for Life, Jenna Hollenstein artfully and compassionately bridges the gap between mindful eating and intuitive eating. If you’ve tried intuitive eating and had trouble implementing the principles, this book may be just what you are missing! It’s more than a book about changing your relationship with food—it’s about changing your relationship with yourself, and may impact your life in ways that you never expected.”
—Alexis Conason, PsyD, psychologist, and author of The Diet-Free Revolution

Alexis Conason

Reading Intuitive Eating for Life is like spending time with a trusted friend who walks alongside you in your own journey. This book recognizes the differences we all bring to our eating, and asks us to celebrate them instead of push against them as diet culture has demanded of us. With sensitivity and compassion, Jenna invites everyone to the table in this thoughtful, practical text.”
—Colleen Clemens, PhD, director of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Kutztown University; and coeditor of Philadelphia Reflections

Colleen Clemens

Intuitive eating often makes sense intellectually, but many people (understandably) struggle with the discomfort and uncertainty that go along with putting it into practice. With Intuitive Eating for Life, Hollenstein shows us how mindfulness is an essential skill that will help you ‘sit with’ these challenges. Full of reflection prompts, tools, and practices, this book will help you explore your relationship to food, eating, and your body from a place of compassion and curiosity.”
—Alissa Rumsey, MS, RD, author of Unapologetic Eating

Alissa Rumsey

I wish this book were a standard-issue user manual for having a human body! Have you tried intuitive eating and needed ‘something’ to make it work? Intuitive Eating for Life is your magic ingredient. Jenna tackles tender realities of living in a body with the gentleness and precision of a true mindfulness master, and offers a path to the cessation of suffering that arises from diet culture. Brilliant and invaluable!”
—Erica Mather, MA, yoga therapist; and author of Your Body, Your Best Friend

Erica Mather

Bravo, Intuitive Eating for Life! I wholeheartedly agree there is undeniable freedom available to us when we embrace the present moment, allowing us not only to celebrate each and every meal before us, but the life-affirming nourishment our souls receive as well.”
—Emme, mother, model, social disrupter, coauthor of Chicken Soup for the Soul: Curvy and Confident, and founder of www.truebeautyfoundation.org

Emme X

★ 11/01/2022

In this anti-diet book, nutrition therapist Hollenstein (Eat To Love) reassures readers that they are the experts of themselves, which is empowering. This is a companion to Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch's Intuitive Eating, which advocates for freeing oneself from the mental trappings of diet culture and to trust one's body regarding food choices. Hollenstein's book expands upon the ideas from the source material by presenting a highly customizable series of mindfulness practices in order to make an intuitive eating lifestyle sustainable. But her book can be a stand-alone as well. Tools such as guided meditations, compassionate self-talk examples, and journaling prompts are provided in order to support lifelong transformation. She explores many aspects of life that are intertwined with body image, including food, movement, emotion, and trauma. By working toward body acceptance, Hollenstein suggests, one can develop the stability and insight to grow in other aspects of life and will likely experience the freedom to embrace their genuine self. VERDICT Hollenstein's relatable, warm, and supportive tone encourages readers to rethink their relationship to their bodies. A much-needed counterbalance to the endless supply of diet books on public library shelves. Highly recommended.—Anitra Gates

Library Journal