How to Quiet Food Noise & Find Your Way to Intuitive Eating with Sabrina Magnan

From one viral TikTok post, we got hundreds of comments saying “Do I have an eating disorder?” So Foster and Cesar sat down with food freedom and intuitive eating coach Sabrina Magnan, host of the Live Unrestricted podcast, for a gentle but honest conversation about diet culture, disordered eating, food noise, and what it actually means to heal your relationship with food and your body. You’re guaranteed to learn about your eating habits as Sabrina breaks down the real difference between intuitive eating and impulsive eating, why willpower has nothing to do with it, and how the path to food freedom runs straight through your nervous system, your emotions, and the beliefs you inherited long before you ever chose your first diet. If you've ever felt out of control around food, trapped in the restrict-binge cycle, or exhausted by the constant mental noise, this episode is exactly what you've been looking for.

In this episode they explore: 

• The one thing no one tells you about the restrict-binge cycle
• What happens when you finally stop fighting your body and start listening to it?
• What food freedom actually looks like

Sabrina Magnan

• IG: @sabrina.magnan.health
• Get her FREE Mini-Course “Decode Your Food Noise”
• Join her Food Freedom Academy
• Listen to her podcast Live, Unrestricted

Related episode: The Eating Habits We Didn’t Choose, Foster first breaks down her undiagnosed eating disorder of 22 years. You can also watch the episodes on YouTube.

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Reach out to the show—send an email or voice note to beautyinthebreakpod@gmail.com and be sure to follow on Instagram and TikTok. 

Cesar Cardona:

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Foster Wilson:

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Created & Hosted by: Cesar Cardona and Foster Wilson

Executive Producer: Glenn Milley

Editor: Bessie Fong

Special Guest: Sabrina Magnan

This episode is brought to you by Arlene Thornton & Associates

Transcript

I was never taught about feelings. I will diet or I will eat as a way to feel better. You're not broken. It has nothing to do with willpower or discipline. Being an intuitive eater is having your health in the forefront because you are making decisions from a place of self-love and self-respect.
Welcome to Beauty and the Break. Here we explore stories of how barriers are broken, both within ourselves and within the world. I'm Foster Wilson. And I'm Cesar Cardona. This is a home for you, questioning the rules you inherited and choosing your own path forward. We are here with you on this messy and courageous journey. Let's dive in.
Welcome back to Beauty and the Break. We are so delighted you are here with us today. And we have a very special guest today, Sabrina Magnan. She is a food freedom and intuitive eating coach and also host of the podcast Live Unrestricted. Sabrina, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me. I am so grateful and excited to be talking to you guys today.
Thank you for being here. I, you know, was on your show a couple of like maybe a month ago and I had such a great conversation. And the reason we wanted to have you on our show today is one of our most popular episodes that went viral on TikTok that we just didn't even expect to hit people so deeply.
It's our eating disorder episode. We did it at episode seven. It is called The Eating Habits We Didn't Choose. And, you know, one of the things that struck me was when we had a clip go viral on TikTok. There were just a huge number of people in the comments feeling very similarly to how I have felt in my restrictive eating and my eating disorder in my life. And they resonated with the way that I felt.
That's wonderful that they resonated. But for me, it was so deeply sad. There were just so many people suffering from this term that I learned in this process, which is food noise.
And so I really wanted to bring you on the show today to help our listeners who may or may not be struggling with this type of thing, who are entrenched in diet culture after decades of this being in our world.
I wanted you to help us kind of get on the right track about how to serve our listeners, how to really help the people that are suffering.
Yeah, absolutely. And I had a very similar experience to you when I started doing this work.
And I would talk to people about it and not just people on the Internet, but people who I knew, they would start opening up to me about it.
And I was so surprised because I thought I was the only one. And when people started feeling comfortable sharing and oftentimes it was the first time they were talking about it.
It made me so sad because so many women hold so much shame around it.
And that shame keeps them from either getting the support or feeling comfortable enough to talk about it, which can lift so much of that heaviness.
Yeah. Yeah. It's really important.
I was wondering that in the videos that we posted, a lot of the comments that I saw were people who either are just finding out that they have an eating disorder or they did not realize they had one.
To those people who might be listening right now, what is what's the first lesson or the first thing you'd want to tell them for their first step into this?
Well, the first thing I would say is that was me. So I get it. I also had an undiagnosed eating disorder and I thought that that's just who I was, that I just I was just always going to struggle with food.
And it was the way I was wired. And the first thing I would say, and I say this to anyone who's like, is this a problem?
If it is interfering with your life in a negative way, it is taking up more mental space than you know that it should.
That right there is enough to just know that you deserve to get support.
You deserve to reach out that out there and so much conditioning that has made women obsess over food and their bodies and that it has nothing to do with willpower or discipline.
In fact, most of the women that I see have extremely high willpower and discipline and have perfectionist tendencies and type A and overachievers.
And that gets translated in the relationship with food.
So it is not a character flaw. It does not mean that you have to struggle with this forever and that there is a very real way out of this.
Yeah, I want to get into all of that today. And I also just want to clarify, too, women and men, any gender.
We had a lot of men in our comments, and I would say that that's a really interesting angle as well.
People who are struggling and may not fit the sort of mold of what it what it looks like, in quotes, to be someone with an eating disorder, because it really is so mental.
And it and it has an effect on your body, of course, but physically, outwardly, we don't know what's what anybody's got going on in their mind.
Right. In terms of the obsession with food, the obsession with the thoughts, which I have certainly suffered with for a great deal of my life.
Before we get into kind of all of the great advice that I know you're going to have for our listeners, can you just tell us something beautiful in your world today?
Oh, yeah. So right now it's summer in Montreal and Canada really is known for their horrible winters.
And it is true that they are horrible. But the summers here are so beautiful.
So I get to spend time by the water. There's so much nature around me, like watching the sunsets, watching the sunrises.
That has been bringing so much beauty into my life lately.
Hmm. I love that. I love that so much.
Can you tell us a little bit about your story?
I know you and I actually have a very similar story when it comes to like restrictive eating and diet culture and all of that.
You were an athlete when you were a teenager. Yes.
Yes. Yeah. So I was a synchronized swimmer.
Wow. Okay. And so what effect did that have on your relationship with food and your body?
Yeah. Big time. So synchronized swimming is very similar to dancing and what we see in ballet, for example, where there's a big focus on the way that your body looks and on perfection and on so much of your worth being attached to something external.
I also come from a family that has really high standards and perfectionist tendencies. And so when I retired from the sport at 16, I was so terrified of gaining weight.
And I remember this one comment that my sister had said to me my last year of training. She had said, if you keep eating that way, you are going to balloon up when you stop swimming. And that obviously stuck with me.
So when I started doing what anyone else would do. I started dieting and cutting out carbs and counting calories and working out two hours a day because to go from training 25 hours a week to not training at all was also just a huge identity shift.
I didn't know who I didn't know who I was. I didn't know who I was. I didn't know who I was. I was 16. So there was like teenage hormones. I was confused. And so I started trying to control the only thing that I could control, which was my weight and food.
And I didn't realize how much of a slippery slope that would become until that turned into years of binging, of yo-yo dieting, of just moving from one thing to another, intermittent fasting, low carb, my fitness pal.
I would eat super clean during the day and in front of other people. And then when nighttime would roll around, I would binge at night and I could not control myself. It felt like something else took over me.
Like I had this second identity that would hijack my brain. And then I would feel so much shame and so much regret afterwards. And especially when you have this identity. I'm disciplined. I'm a hard worker. I have a great work ethic. That feels even more embarrassing.
And when I went to university, my eating disorder morphed away from a lot of binging and towards a unhealthy obsession with being healthy, which I later learned was called orthorexia, but I didn't know at the time.
And I had a fit bit, which now allowed me to track every single step that I was taking and calorie that I was burning. And I was plugging everything into my fitness pal.
And so for someone who has perfectionist tendencies, who likes to see things black and white, just tell me what to do. Give me the rules that felt like it was really working for me.
But what ended up happening is I noticed that, oh, if I track everything I eat and everything I burn, it almost became like a game because I was noticing that I was losing weight and I was getting compliments.
And that was fuel to the fire of I'm doing this right. People are finding me impressive. And so I would just keep going. And it almost became this competition with myself.
And I had this belief, which I didn't know at the time was driving everything, that once I hit a certain weight, then I will feel happy. Then I will feel confident. Then I will feel loved.
And I had this rock bottom moment at my sister's baby shower where it was the first time I was becoming an aunt. It was supposed to be this beautiful day with my family. And I just binged the entire afternoon.
I remember sitting in my parents' basement that night feeling so horrible physically, but emotionally and mentally just thinking, how did I get here?
How did it get this bad? And what is my life going to look like if I keep doing this? Because I was missing out on so much.
There were so many things. The anxiety that was consuming me all the time. It would stop me from going out to dinner or from seeing friends. I would just stay home and then I would binge because I felt alone and I just wanted something to make me feel better.
I'm hearing this thread of your life and your sister said this information to you that you kind of really held on to. It made me wonder if she also was in swim as well or was she in athletics? And then you're also at the same time doing this, for lack of a better term, sun and moon, where like in the daytime you're eating clean. At night you're doing this on your own.
What was the family and the community and the friends? What were they like? What were their expectations? What did you perceive them as?
Wow. I have been on so many podcasts and no one has ever asked me that or noticed that, which is super interesting. My sister was also a synchronized swimmer and to my knowledge, never struggled with food and her body in the same way.
However, there was this unspoken belief and conditioning in my family that if you were in a bigger body, you were less worthy or you would be judged. And even when I started doing this work, I had to sit my parents down and say, I'm going to actively work on healing my relationship with food and my body.
I need any comments about my body, whether it's good or bad, and other people's bodies to stop because all of that is very triggering for me. And, you know, Tony Robbins talks about how you'll often morph your personality to get the approval of your parent that you wanted the most love from. And that was definitely my dad.
And I definitely think that part of that was if I can just look a certain way and I can fit into the family because I'm the youngest of five, then I will get the attention. I will be part of it. I will be accepted. So that was definitely part of the conditioning and the wiring.
Well, it shocks me. One, I think it's actually beautiful that you made a point to them saying, good or bad, please withhold what you want to say.
I have been a boxing trainer for 10 years and I had a client and friend who I would weekly check in in the middle of the workout and say, how's your weight going?
To check in so I can get a gauge as a trainer. And so I can like say, oh, this is where we are. Let this work. This didn't work. Let's figure this way out.
And they turned to me one day and said, I just need to say, I need you to stop asking me that question. And it really, I never asked them that question again. And it really hit me in a moment of, it's not just how I say something, it's what I say.
And so you saying that to them is probably eye-opening to them. And then what's more is that for anybody who comes from the outside like me, who is not familiar with this condition or does not experience this condition, we're learning something a little deeper here that it's not just how it's said, it's what is said as well.
Thank you for saying that part in particular, because that's really eye-opening for me from the outside.
Yeah, that's beautiful. And I think that oftentimes, a lot of women will be able to relate to this, that their parents will say comments about their weights. And oftentimes, we think that it's coming from a good place of, well, if I show concern about your weight, then maybe you're more likely to change or take care of yourself.
And what I always want to remind people of is that these people know when you get comments from your family about your weight and around what you're eating, you're already so self-conscious about it yourself that to be reminded of things that you are deeply struggling with just creates more of this belief of I'm broken, I can't figure this out, I will never be able to figure this out.
I'm very appreciative of you saying it that way. From the outside, it really helps. It really helps to hear that.
Yeah, I resonate with so much of your story, Sabrina. I mean, we have had this conversation too on your show where it's just like the parallels of our lives are so similar.
I also was an athlete and training a great deal at 15, 16 in Taekwondo and was also very much influenced by a family system that believed that bigger bodies were less worthy.
And that is something that's like still reinforced today. That's something I've struggled with so much that I'm still working to unhook and unlearn that.
And I had a deep fear of being in a bigger body, a deep fear of gaining weight.
And I, in my struggles with food and food noise and constantly feeling like I could never get it right, I was always getting it wrong.
I would do that cycle of restricting my eating or eating really clean and kind of orthorexia as well.
And then also just could not control myself often at night and then would wake up feeling guilty and repeat the cycle just day in and day out.
I think what a lot of people in society think of as an eating disorder is that it looks like anorexia, which physically looks very, very sick on the outside to somebody.
And then they also know about bulimia, which has a binge and purge cycle.
Now we all know there's so much more nuance to disordered eating and that it can look like restricting yourself in certain ways to somebody to the outside doesn't look like it.
A body that seems healthy and normal on the outside, but a mind that is really sick and suffering.
And then when we restrict our eating so greatly during the day or with certain foods that are off limits that we label as bad and we don't eat that.
And we have these diets and we, I, for a long time was on Weight Watchers, like all, all kinds of things.
Then when those foods are available, we're still craving it.
And so our bodies like overdo it.
And that is kind of what this restrictive binge cycle can feel like.
We just didn't get enough.
And we're so deprived that then at some point our bodies are like, give it all to us.
And we just have that uncontrollable feeling to eat in excess.
Yes, absolutely.
And then there's so many beliefs that go into that when you're so used to having this pattern of I either eat it or I don't.
When you finally do open the door and you're like, F it.
I've already started.
Then there's this program that gets turned on of, well, I don't know when's the next time I'm going to allow myself to have this food again.
So I might as well just have all of the things because I already feel guilty.
I've already ruined my day.
That's where that black and white thinking goes.
And that's why so many women have these perfectionist tendencies as well.
Because it's like, I'm going to be perfect until I'm not.
And once I'm not, then I'm just going to take it all the way.
And I'm going to start over tomorrow.
So there are so many beliefs and programs that go into this loss of control.
And we haven't even touched on what's going on in your body and your nervous system.
But yes, absolutely.
When certain foods are on a pedestal, then they will feel so much more important for you.
Yeah.
Can you take us to the moment where you said you had a rock bottom, right?
Can you take us to what instigated healing and how you found a healing journey for yourself?
Yeah.
So I had that rock bottom at my sister's baby shower.
And that night, I truly don't know how this popped into my brain.
I think this was like a divine message that just made me start thinking of,
I need to get away this summer.
I was young.
I was 20, 21.
I had never traveled on my own.
And I just started thinking, I need to go to Italy.
And I've always wanted to go to Italy.
It was always in my top, top travel places.
And immediately after that thought, I had the next thought, which was, you can't do that.
You're going to gain weight.
You're going to have to eat all of these foods that you don't allow yourself to have.
And I was so controlling at the time that the thought of going to Italy,
which I ended up doing to be an au pair, so to be a live-in nanny,
where other people would control my food was so terrifying to me.
And it was terrifying to see how terrified I was to go on a trip, to do something that was a dream of mine.
And realizing that I almost was going to stop myself from doing something that was important to me,
that was a core life experience that I wanted to have.
I just realized I don't care how scared I am.
I don't care how anxious I am.
I need to do this.
So I went to Italy and I started experiencing what a healthy relationship with food looks like.
Because people there, they don't talk about burning off their gelatos.
They see food as connection, as pleasure.
They enjoy it.
They revere it.
And it is such a different relationship that I was used to, which was all about control.
It was about a way to make my body look smaller.
And as I started very, very, it was tough at first.
I was really reluctant and I would still make my own meals.
But over time, I started eating more and eating different types of foods.
And I realized that I was feeling I had more energy.
I was feeling better.
I wasn't tired all the time.
And it was this realization that maybe it's not about what I eat.
And maybe I don't need to be healthy.
I don't need to do all of these things that I was doing back home that I thought I needed to do.
And that trip did not heal me 100%.
But it planted a seed that when I came home after that, I was dedicated.
I was like, I am going to maintain and continue to go deeper into understanding why I had struggled so deeply.
That's when I started diving deep into everything.
All of the things that are lying underneath the surface when it comes to disordered eating, eating disorders, body image, binge eating.
I was so consumed by understanding why is it that people who are so successful, who are so smart, there is so much information out there.
Why are people still struggling after trying so many things?
And I've always been one who will ask the question why a million times.
And I always want to find the patterns.
So it just sparked this passion within me that I knew I was meant to do.
It makes me wonder about you going to Italy and seeing an entirely different culture, see food in a different way, view food in a different way.
So they saw it as connection.
They saw it as togetherness.
Is it a Europe and America thing?
Is it an old culture, new culture thing that is brought upon this?
I have also lived in France and it was similar.
Definitely France and Italy have similar cultures around food.
But I also have worked with a lot of clients in the UK who have a tumultuous and difficult relationship with food that is slightly different from what we see here in the States or in Canada.
So I don't know that it's a Europe or North America thing, but more of a country to country.
And then there's always going to be people within those countries who are exceptions to the rules.
Yeah.
So talk to me a little bit about how you found intuitive eating as a topic, because it's also something that's really helped me demystify intuitive eating for us for a bit.
Yeah.
So I found the concept of intuitive eating after I had started coaching, because when I started coaching, I still had a lot of remnants of diet culture in my brain.
And I had a business coach who kept telling me, you have to sell weight loss.
The only way that you're going to make money is by selling weight loss.
So me being a good student that I am, I did that for a couple of months and it felt so icky.
I would get on these calls with clients and they were telling me, I've lost five pounds.
And I'd be like, I don't care.
How is your relationship with food?
Because if you've lost weight, but you're anxious and miserable and just controlling, that's not what we need.
And then I read the intuitive eating book and it was like someone had written down all of the thoughts that I ever had around food.
All of the emotions, all of the patterns had written a book on me.
And it was shocking.
I was like, how is this a concept that I never knew about?
So intuitive eating, and it's an important conversation to have at this moment in time, because I feel like there's a lot of misconceptions around intuitive eating.
And I also do, I love the framework and I do think that there are some missing pieces to it.
So the first thing I want to say is that I don't see intuitive eating as the path.
I see it as the destination.
So the destination is to become an intuitive eater.
And to be an intuitive eater means that you eat by listening to your body and by trusting it deeply.
So when you are hungry, you eat.
When you are done, when you are satisfied, you are able to stop eating.
And you don't have these negative beliefs and emotions associated with food.
Food is a non-issue.
You will naturally gravitate towards healthier foods because that's what feels good for you and for your body.
But you can also have chips and pizza and pasta without any kind of guilt, without losing control, without it meaning anything about you.
So it's what a lot of people would just deem as quote unquote normal eating, even though what does normal even mean anymore.
But it's being able to be in tune with your body to have positive, empowering, peaceful thoughts around food.
And a big aspect of it too is for food to just be food.
So for it to no longer serve a purpose or the function of regulating you, of coping with stress compulsively, where it's your only or primary way of coping with emotions, of pushing them down, of a use of distractions.
A lot of people who struggle with food, when I ask them the question, well, if you weren't thinking about food all the time, if you didn't have this outlet for this obsession, then what would you have to face in your life that you don't want to face right now?
And so it's when food gets to move away from this role that it's been playing in your life.
And it goes back to being connection and enjoyment and fuel and nourishment for your body.
My gosh, that's so beautiful.
It's such a different relationship than any of us really, I think, have in this culture very often.
You said something a while back about the industry, like this business coach wanting you to sell weight loss.
And I think this is where so much of it comes from is because it's a mega industry.
I could feel you getting warm right next to me.
You took a deep breath.
I almost rubbed your back because I could feel you just like seething at that thought.
I feel emotional about that because the idea that there are these companies and individuals and huge conglomerates that profit so much off of something that really makes people in the end stuff.
I think it contributes to the suffering of just the mental health of so many individuals.
And I was one of those people.
And I, you know, still slip in and out of that.
And the idea that money is behind it, it's like, well, of course, right?
Of course.
But it's maybe it's more prevalent in the United States than in other parts of the world.
I don't really know.
But because our culture is so focused on capitalism and money and things that make money.
But when you switch that, you really say food is about connection and nourishment.
As a postpartum doula, one of the things that I offer is I provide nourishment to the person who just gave birth.
And that is emotional nourishment.
And that is also food nourishment and teas and warm soups and broths.
Like that's part of the service and the gift of caring for somebody.
And so what I'm hearing you say is like, really, we need to turn this around and give ourselves the care that we would give to somebody else to nourish ourselves.
And the freedom, because you talk about food freedom, right?
The freedom that I have experienced in going from living my day where the thoughts about food consumed my mind all day long, 24-7.
Like really thinking about when my next meal was going to be.
Really thinking about what I was going to have.
When was the time to stop?
To now, I think about food like just before I'm going to eat it and then like completely forget about it and move on to other things.
And that is a gift that I do not take for granted.
That is through intuitive eating.
Well, I would say through my healing journey.
Like you said, like intuitive eating is a component that I definitely read that book and resonated with a lot of that and took a lot of the tools from that book.
But like you're saying, it's like a place that you land.
So there's different ways to get there.
Yeah.
And what I'm seeing more and more is that I love, I love, and I am an intuitive eater.
And I'm always one who's going to encourage to read the book.
But I think that where a lot of people have found themselves is they've read the book or they've started to try to quote unquote do intuitive eating.
And what they find themselves stuck in is that they struggle to implement the advice of, okay, for example, listening to your body or making peace with food or feeling your emotions without using food.
Because food is just a symptom.
And when we go back to this conversation around weight, right?
Oftentimes, food is a way to control and soothe this lack of safety that we feel in our bodies.
When we look at society at large to be part of the group and to be accepted and to be seen as worthy, you need to look a certain way.
And so to have dieted your entire life.
And now it's like, okay, I'm going to start listening to my body.
Well, listening to your body might for your nervous system feel extremely dangerous because it could mean that you will gain weight.
And gaining weight to your nervous system could feel like death.
And it could be for so many reasons.
Maybe your family was fat phobic.
Maybe food has always been like your only source of comfort.
So to take that away, the only way to cope with emotions is taken away.
Then you're left with a void of, oh, well, I'm going to have to sit with all of this discomfort of these emotions that I haven't allowed myself to feel my entire life.
And so what I notice is that it is the principles are sound, but the missing piece is, well, how do we create safety in your body and your nervous system so that you can do the things that you quote unquote know you should be doing?
I get the image in my head of an attic full of years and years of things you've just kept behind this door to not want to let it out.
And then you get to this point of, let me listen to my body.
Let me open the door in the attic, right?
How can we manage to make the room in which it's going to pour out not get messed, not get covered in all of the things that are hiding away in that attic?
I like the listening to your body part.
I'm a Buddhist and I teach meditation and it puts me in mind of mindfulness.
And I teach growth mindfulness.
You also teach or you have courses on mindful eating.
And hearing the listen to your body, for me, it links those two together.
Tell me more about mindful eating.
Yeah, of course, because we live in a world where we are constantly distracted.
There is so much noise, not just physical noise, but noise in our mind.
And we're always doing something at the same time and we're busy and we're going a million miles an hour.
And so mindful eating is one really helpful practice to get back in touch with the experience of eating.
I have some of my clients with certain foods that they used to feel out of control around.
One that comes to mind is Thai Express Pad Thai was one of my clients.
I gave her the exercise of eating it mindfully, which means let's remove the distractions.
Let's sit at a table.
It's just you and the food.
And oftentimes when we have this disordered relationship with food, even though we are so excited to eat the food and we also kind of feel guilty about it, but it's on a pedestal.
We have such a complicated relationship with it.
The second you start eating, you almost feel like, let me just finish it as fast as possible so that I can stop feeling guilty about this.
And so to really be present with the food and to allow yourself, I use this describe it to me method is what I call it, where I told her, imagine I'm sitting next to you.
I've never eaten this food before.
I've actually never eaten any food before.
And you have to describe to me the texture, the smell, how it feels in your mouth.
Is it spicy?
Is it sweet?
You have to describe everything about the food.
And a lot of people will do this with foods that they thought they were obsessed with, that they couldn't control themselves around.
And they realize, I don't even like this.
This isn't even good.
And a couple of bites after, they're like, it's not worth it to me.
So much of your relationship with food is connected to your relationship with yourself.
And when you really start respecting yourself and your body, you don't want to put things in your mouth that aren't worth it.
Like, this is delicious.
This is good.
I want to be eating this.
And so when you can reconnect to that inner sense of self-love, then you will become more intentional about the decisions that you make.
Isn't this wild, the mind?
Isn't it just wild?
You shift gears from sixth to second gear.
And all of a sudden, the thing that you plan on eating, you don't even like anymore.
Are you familiar with Buddhist concepts?
Because this meditative eating is a very common thing in Tibetan Buddhism and Zen Buddhism as well.
Yes.
Yeah.
I am familiar with it.
Wonderful.
Wonderful.
We do that plenty in a lot of retreats.
They'll do that in a lot of half-day retreats.
You sit and it's just that.
It's the texture and the process and the food and the smell and the taste and the sounds around.
One thing that I love about the intuitive eating book is this pause where you're, I mean, you're talking about sitting and eating with no distractions, no TV, no phone.
And there's a pause before you eat your meal.
And I've heard it described in a bunch of different ways.
But there is kind of built into our cultural history this idea of prayer before you eat, which is our ancestors' way of pausing before they consume this food, having gratitude for it.
You know, whatever your religious or non-religious ideology is like, this is, I think, the intention behind a prayer before a meal is to, like, bring yourself into awareness.
We're about to eat.
We're grateful that we have food to nourish our bodies and do so mindfully.
And so that little pause, even for me, it started out very difficult to take three seconds to pause before I eat something that was not common for me at all.
But I love that practice.
It's a great point.
It's a great point.
Yeah.
And what's coming up for me is that also that pause for so many of us, when you're constantly living from the neck up, you're living in your head.
So many of us aren't living in our bodies because to be in our bodies and to feel the sensation of discomfort, of anxiety, of stress, of joy, to feel all of that nuance, it can feel really dangerous and uncomfortable.
And so to take that pause and to allow yourself to drop into your body.
Of course, that's going to help you to listen to your body and be more present.
But it can be really hard.
But it can be really hard.
And I know because I always have to remind myself when I go through periods where I'm noticing, whoa, you've been keeping yourself real busy and distracted lately.
What are you running from?
I have to slow things down.
And OK, let's take some time away from the phone and the TV and be with myself so that whatever needs to come through has the space to come through.
Yeah, that's so true.
Are there misconceptions about intuitive eating?
What do you encounter with your clients?
Yes.
The biggest one is that it's about eating whatever you want, whenever you want, without any regards to health or how it makes you feel.
I always explain that I am healthier now as an intuitive eater than I ever was when I was controlling everything that I eat.
Because being an intuitive eater is having your health in the forefront because you are making decisions from a place of self-love and self-respect.
And so a great example is let's say you did start intuitive eating.
You're like, oh, well, unconditional permission to eat, which is one of the principles, unconditional permission to eat.
So that means I can eat whatever I want, whenever I want.
And so a little thought experiment is, OK, well, let's say that ice cream for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner, and you do that for a week.
How long would it take you before you would think to yourself, I cannot look at another pint of ice cream.
All I want is something fresh right now.
Give me a fruit.
Give me a vegetable.
And so when you really start tapping into the connection between how certain foods make you feel and your energy levels and your mood and just how you feel in your body,
then you will naturally gravitate towards foods that make you feel good.
Because, for example, I need energy to be focused at work and to be there for my clients and to be creative.
I need all of that.
And so I will choose to make decisions that will honor those goals.
So that's a really big one that I see is that you always have to choose the quote unquote unhealthy option.
But really with the permission to say yes also comes the permission and the choice to say no.
I've heard you say there's a difference between intuitive eating and impulsive eating.
Yes.
What's the difference there?
Impulsive eating is it's reactional.
It's often driven by certain beliefs or emotions.
Right.
Impulsive eating is I have to have this now.
But an intuitive eater doesn't feel that way.
I have to have this now or else what?
Or else I'm never going to be able to have this again.
Or I need to have this now because I can't sit with the discomfort that I feel in my body right now.
And I need to escape it through food.
And an intuitive eater is going to be able to, okay, I'm noticing that I'm feeling discomfort.
I'm feeling anxious.
And I'm wanting to turn to food.
There's more thought around it.
There's more intention behind it.
And this is one of the terms that I use all the time with my clients, which is the importance of your intention behind your choice.
You can have two exact same choices around food.
You can choose to go to the restaurant and have the salad.
But one person intention behind it could be, I want the burger, but I'm going to force myself to have the salad because it's the healthiest option on the menu.
And I need to stay on plan.
And that intention is driven by anxiety and pressure and control.
Whereas there might be someone else who's like, I actually, I feel like a salad sounds really good.
I feel fresh.
I want something lighter tonight.
And the intention behind it is self-love.
How do I want my body to feel?
And so when we look at intuitive eating versus impulsive eating, the biggest question that I would ask is, what is the intention behind your choice?
And that will give you a really good idea of which camp you fall into.
Forgive me for going back to it again, but there's just this undercurrent of this Buddhist practices as well.
It makes perfect sense.
It's 5,000 years of mindfulness, right?
But we talk about intention constantly, constantly.
And then to make another note of what you said about having ice cream every single day, constantly.
There was a meditation teacher who told somebody who had trouble thinking about sex constantly.
They said, can I meditate to not think about it?
And he said, actually think about it in the seated meditation and only that.
After 30 seconds, they couldn't stick with it.
And he said, do you see how seeing through it is?
Do you see how it's not about the thing you saw straight through whatever the circumstances?
It's not what you think it is.
And it kind of helped that person shed that illusion of what their minds are in.
I'm fascinated to see how many of these threads keep connecting to each other.
Yeah.
I was going to say, the more I practice intuitive eating, the more nuanced I realize my body really is, what it's asking for food-wise.
I think you and I have a similar, quote unquote, like problem food in peanut butter, because I know it's the picture on your podcast.
And for me, it was always peanut butter.
Like, you cannot eat peanut butter.
If I have peanut butter in the house, I will eat the entire jar.
It's so high fat.
Like, all of these things, right?
And when I found the intuitive eating book, and one of the things is unrestricted access to food and permission to eat and rejecting diet culture, I had peanut butter.
I did the first couple of times eat way more than my body was comfortable.
And then I got very sick of it very quickly, just like you were saying, very quickly.
Now, I have a very moderate relationship.
I can keep it in the house.
I have it sometimes.
I probably go weeks without having it.
It's no longer, I don't know if problem food is the right thing, but just like my mind is not wrapped around this forbidden food.
Yeah.
And when I tap into my body, when I tap into what I actually feel like, you know, sitting at the restaurant, the burger or the salad, what does my body actually feel like?
It's a somatic experience.
And this is something I've been working on a lot in the last couple of years is trying to come back into my body and really go, what sounds good today?
What sounds good right in this moment?
And if we really pay attention, our body knows what we need.
It's like, I've had snacks all day.
I really want like a big protein meal or I've just have been eating heavy foods.
I really not want something light and fresh.
In particular, for people who have cycles, if we really listen to our bodies, our cycles will tell us at different points in our cycle what we need to nourish our bodies right now.
Because my body on a bleed day is a very different body than my body on an ovulating day, right?
So that is something that we can really kind of like ride the waves of what our bodies need.
Yeah, and it's such a good point because being an intuitive eater, it gives you back to the term of freedom.
It gives you the freedom on the days where leading into your period, you are hungrier.
There isn't that voice telling you that, oh my God, I'm eating more than I did last week and I'm doing something wrong.
And what if I gain weight?
You're able to just honor, okay, well, my body is telling me that it needs more food.
And so I'm going to listen because my body knows best.
And there's this deep trust and understanding and companionship.
When you are talking about that intuition piece and that somatic experience, one thing that might be really helpful for anyone who's listening who is able to relate to everything we're talking about, what can be really helpful is starting to get in touch with what is a full body yes for you in your body?
What does that feel like?
Let's say, and it doesn't have to be with food, if you want to start training your intuition in really small ways of, oh, okay, do I want to go for a walk or do I want to read a book?
Do I want to watch this movie or do I want to watch this movie?
And that's what Luke, my boyfriend, will do all the time is I do well with options.
So he'll say, okay, do you want to watch this movie or do you want to watch this movie?
And I will feel in my body, oh, I'm excited.
I feel expansive.
I feel lifted.
This is a full body yes for me versus a full body knows like, oh, this is contricting.
There's lack of space.
I want, I like want to push away from it.
That's a full body.
Absolutely not.
And so when you can start recognizing that your intuition is speaking to you in small ways every day, then you can start doing that with food of, oh, okay, does the sandwich, is this sandwich or this sandwich sound good to me?
And of course, there's removing that voice that's saying what you should or shouldn't be doing and just allowing your intuition to have more of a voice.
Everybody needs to tap in way more.
We've just gotten so far away from it, but it really can take you, that access to your intuition can really take us so far in life beyond just the food conversation, but really in the choices that we're making in life.
What does feel like a yes and what does feel like a no?
I want to ask you, I have friends who have kids who are in that sweet spot of like 13 years old and in a dance culture.
Despite the families not being fat phobic or anything like that, there is still these ideas of diet culture creeping in to their kids' lives and questions that are coming up of like, I need to track my calories.
I need to skip this meal.
I'm not hungry, but it doesn't quite make sense because they've just worked out a lot.
It's something that's so deeply touching to me because of my childhood and how I don't want anyone else to go down this path, especially given how much we know now.
What advice would you give to those parents who are struggling with kids maybe tiptoeing into diet culture?
Yeah, I mean, first of all, I am sorry.
That is not something that you want to have to deal with.
And you love your kids so much.
The first piece of advice I would give, and I'm sure that your friends are already doing this if they're friends with you,
is really to keep the channel of communication as open as possible and to get curious and to ask a lot of questions.
Because our relationship with food, it always has a function.
It always has a deeper meaning to why we're telling ourselves we're not hungry or why we feel like we need to lose weight or look a certain way.
And so the way that I approach things is I ask a lot of questions just to dig deeper into, okay, what is your relationship with your body?
And what do you perceive gaining weight or losing weight is going to give you?
And because they probably don't know, I didn't know at the time why I was doing the things that I was doing.
And so to really get curious, to help them clue into, okay, what do I think that this is going to give me to diet?
Maybe my friends are dieting and I feel like if I diet that I'm going to be part of that.
So I would say to get really curious.
And the second piece of it, this is advice that I've given to my sister as well, is I don't have kids.
So I like take this with a grain of salt.
But personally, I have always found that when people are honest with me, I feel more comfortable being honest with them.
And my parents were never, never the type to talk about their struggles and their feelings and their relationship with themselves, which made me feel like this is not a conversation that we have here.
You're also going into the world a little blind as well, without any modes of how to do something.
Exactly. I was never taught about feelings.
So when I started having all of these uncomfortable teenage emotions, I was like, I don't know what to do with this.
So I will diet or I will eat as a way to feel better.
And so I think that would have been really helpful for me to understand the emotional landscape of being a human and that even adults have challenges or have had challenges.
And when you open the door, it creates safety for other people to be vulnerable about what they're going through.
Well said. I love that.
Sabrina, thank you for coming on our show and for sharing your wisdom.
Of course. You guys are great interviewers.
I know that so many people are going to want to get in touch with you and reach out.
And how can they follow along with what you're up to and you're offering?
Yeah. So they can find me on Instagram @SabrinaMagnanHealth.
I actually have a brand new free mini course if they would like to take part and learn more about their relationship with food.
It's called Decode Your Food Noise.
And so it dives deep into understanding the root causes of why you think about food constantly, why it has such a big hold over you.
So I'd be happy to give you the link so that you can share it with them.
And if they want to know more about working with me, I have a program called Food Freedom Academy.
So they can find all information at SabrinaMagnanHealth.com/FFA.
And I can also share the link with you.
Perfect. Yeah, we'll put all of that in the show notes.
I want to come take this quiz now because I'm very curious about that.
So sign me up.
Thank you so much for being with us and just sharing your choice.
Of course, this was so lovely.
Thank you for being here.
And as always, please be kind to yourself.
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We'll see you next time.
Beauty in the Break is created and hosted by Foster Wilson and Cesar Cardona.
Our executive producer is Glenn Milley.
Original music by Cesar & the Clew.