“`html
Dresden – A breakfast of fruit, whole-grain bread with cottage cheese and honey, followed by cheese-baked broccoli, potatoes, and even a chocolate bar. Does that sound like intuitive eating? For Nora stankewitz, a systemic therapist based in Dresden, it’s a starting point for a conversation about how we relate to food and the pressures that shape our choices.
Beyond Dieting: Reclaiming Your Relationship with Food
Table of Contents
Intuitive eating isn’t about restriction; it’s about understanding what your body truly needs and letting go of guilt around food choices.
- Intuitive eating prioritizes body acceptance over conforming to body ideals.
- Pressure, compulsion, or guilt surrounding food are signals to step back from intuitive eating.
- Listening to early hunger cues-like lack of concentration-is key to reconnecting with your body.
- Societal pressures,notably for women,frequently enough complicate our relationship with food.
Intuitive eating is a process of learning to trust your body’s internal cues, rather than following external rules about what and how much to eat. “It depends on how much you thought before, during and after eating and how you felt during it,” explains Stankewitz.”There are people who tell themselves that they have to eat super healthy… and if they don’t do that, they feel incredibly guilty afterwards.”
The weight of expectations
Manny associate intuitive eating with weight loss, but Stankewitz emphasizes that’s not the goal. “It shouldn’t be about that, but about giving up the desire to conform to a certain body ideal and instead developing an acceptance of your own food and your own body, even if you may not be satisfied with it or not always.” She acknowledges that the desire to lose weight often surfaces in consultations, and her approach involves questioning the root of that desire. “I ask: What is behind this desire? What do you hope to achieve with it? What do you think will change in your life if you are thinner?”
Stankewitz points to the media’s influence on body image, recalling a time when “advertising presented to us at the time and what body images were propagated. That was the time of Kate Moss, Size Zero and the first seasons of Germany’s Next Top Model.” while acknowledging that media trends aren’t the sole cause of eating disorders, she believes they can be a critically important factor, especially for those already vulnerable.
Why Focus on Women?
Stankewitz specifically directs her services toward women as of the societal pressures they face. “As we still live in patriarchal structures today in which women are told that they have to be as attractive as possible and take up as little space as possible, both with their bodies
