a Psychotherapist and life coach who's helped clients and students get to the bottom of why they use food to cope.
Hey, I’m natalie,
If you’re new to my work WELCOME! I am so glad you found me. :)
Here are a few tips:
I’d strongly recommend starting with courses one through three as they’re designed to give you the foundation of why you use food to cope and provide tools and strategies to help support you.
My goal is to help you manage the emotional eating cycle and start processing the emotions that make you turn to food in the first place.
If you choose to skip the foundational courses, you won’t gain the full value of why you’re here in the first place—to heal your emotional eating, reconnect with yourself and become the healed version of you you’ve always wanted to be. :)
FOOD IS NOT THE ENEMY
An intro to understanding why you use food to cope
COURSE 1 - Start here
(Recommended First Course)
We've been led to believe that emotional eating is a food or habit problem. If we struggle to control our weight, we're somehow “broken or lazy”. Many clients feel a great deal of shame or guilt because of the yo-yo life they've been living.
In this foundational course, you'll learn why food is not the issue and why binging to soothe pain, numb sadness, or stuff frustration deep inside isn't your fault. You'll begin to understand why you use food to cope with everyday triggers like stress, loneliness or boredom instead of feeling the emotion and turning inward instead.
You'll gain tools to let go of the old way of thinking, start learning to connect to who you truly are, make peace with your past relationship with food and become friends with food.
HOW TO MANAGE THE BINGE / EMOTIONAL EATING CYCLE
How to tune into your body, regulate your emotions and nurture yourself
COURSE 2
You know how to lose weight—eat less, move more. Easy, right? But why can’t you do it? That’s because it has nothing to do with food, and everything to do with your body. More specifically, your brain and what’s happening during a binge.
In this two-part course, you’ll understand the science behind why you numb uncomfortable emotions with food, how to neutralize them and connect to your body instead.
You’ll walk away with everyday tools to help you feel grounded within yourself, honor your needs, and recognize the feelings that make you want to emotionally eat.
By knowing how your brain works, you can slow your thoughts around food and start to understand your behaviors when they crop up so you can change unwanted patterns that keep you stuck in the binge-eating cycle.
Learn to regulate your emotions instead of suppressing them with food.
(Course 2 is a prerequisite)
COURSE 3
FEEL YOUR FEELINGS
Now that you understand why you use food to cope and the science behind emotional eating, how do you distinguish hunger versus eating to avoid a difficult emotion?
It's a common question I get from emotional eaters who are frustrated by their lack of control around food when they're feeling overwhelmed, tired or merely bored.
When they're in the pantry, they rationalize why they "shouldn't" eat the brownie, but the more they focus on it, the stronger the urge to binge becomes. Society wants you to think you lack willpower and motivation when the truth is—you haven't learned how to sit with your feelings and "okay" the emotion.
In this two-part course, I'll teach you how to regulate your emotions so you can recognize the difference between eating to stuff your feelings versus a hunger-signal to eat.
You'll safely explore primary emotions like sadness, happiness, fear, and anger to make peace with your feelings and lessen their intensity to better manage everyday triggers like stress, frustration and overwhelm.
You'll discover that Feeling Your Feelings is the key to changing your relationship with food.
Making peace with your body (at any size) as you heal your relationship with food.
COURSE 4
Body Love
You’re familiar with the idea of loving your body, but how do you do that when you’ve spent years hating it?
That’s a question I get from a lot of clients and past students who’ve spent years restricting and depriving themselves, eating until they’re uncomfortable, and hating the way they look. If there's one thing I'd want them to know, it's that you can make peace with your body at any size.
Yes, even with the stretch marks, the love handles and the saggy skin. As someone who's been there, I can tell you it’s possible to appreciate your body and think it's beautiful.
In this 90-minute course, you’ll learn how society and culture affect your self-worth and contributes to your negative body image. You’ll gain tools to help you speak lovingly to your body and release the shame and judgment towards yourself so you can be free and enjoy life…
It's my sole intention to help you walk away from this course with a newfound appreciation for your body so you can live your life and begin embracing all of you.
How to fill yourself up without food.
COURSE 5
SELF-CARE ISN’T SELFISH
When most people think of self-care, things like eating right, exercise, adequate sleep, or a warm, candle-lit bath come to mind. Self-care is so much more than that.
Between kids, 40-hour workweeks, caring for family and making time for friends, many of my clients are left with little time for themselves.
Instead, they retreat to the pantry looking for fast, easy comfort hoping to fulfil an emotional need with food. Unfortunately, this temporary strategy is short-lived and often followed by a lot of guilt.
In this 90-minute course, you’ll learn how to stop using food to fulfil your emotional, physical or spiritual needs and create a practical, soulful self-care plan instead.
I'll walk you through the steps of building your self-care toolbox so you can implement concrete strategies to make changes in your life right away.
Most importantly, I’ll help you release the guilt you feel for putting yourself first and recognize that self-care isn't selfish—it's a necessity for healing all aspects of your life—your relationships with family, friends and food.
MAKING PEACE WITH FOOD
Creating emotional freedom with every bite.
COURSE 6
Imagine eating a meal without worrying about the calories or feeling physically and emotionally satisfied after you ate. And just imagine what it’d be like not to obsess over food and just enjoy every bite.
Whether you can’t eat without thinking about the calories or you’re starving yourself all day and then binge-eating at night, you’ve got a love/hate relationship with food and it’s controlling every aspect of your life.
In this 90-minute course, I’ll teach you how to slow down and be present when eating so you can enjoy food with less anxiety and guilt. You’ll also gain tools and strategies to help you reframe your relationship with food.
Inner Child
How to create inner peace and self-love
COURSE 7
You may have heard of the idea of inner child healing, but what does it mean exactly? And what does it have to do with emotional eating?
We learn a lot of beliefs, behaviours, emotional skills, as well as much of the pain that we carry, early in life. Then we repeat those patterns for years, reinforcing them every day, many of which lead us to turn to food to cope. In this course, I’ll teach you how to interrupt those long-held emotional patterns by recreating a connection with your inner child to bring them the love and caring that they need.
This 90-minute course teaches you what an unhealed child looks like, and helps you discover what your inner child needs to feel nurtured. By connecting with your inner child, you will learn how to nurture and care for yourself and meet your own needs instead of turning to food.