This short episode takes you through a very simple but effective process to get you out of both eating your feelings and feeling irritated or resentful toward someone.

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In this episode, I break down the five elements of a great nervous system regulation toolkit for food and weight stress.

I walk through the five elements: understanding where food and body stress actually comes from, building basic emotional competency, learning embodied regulation (the heart of the work), working with the thought patterns underneath — in the right order — and navigating the real-life triggers that set it all off.

This episode is the framework behind a course I'm building to help women move through food and weight stress using their nervous system, not more willpower. Subscribe to the Wait.What? newsletter (below) to be first to know when it opens.

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[This episode is part of the Weight-Neutral Health Care In Aotearoa NZ Series]

This week I'm talking with Andrea Palmer, a Wellington-based dietitian, about weight-neutral family feeding — what it actually looks like and why that's harder than it sounds in a culture obsessed with kids' weight.

In this episode:

• What family-style feeding is, why the parent's job stops at what/when/where, and how removing the moral hierarchy between foods changes the whole dynamic at the table
• Why restricting a bigger kid's food usually backfires — and why pressuring a smaller kid to eat more does too
• How to handle a GP who suggests weight loss for your child, including a question that exposes the bias behind that advice
• Why yo-yo dieting costs kids and how never restricting a child sets them up for a steadier relationship with food for life

As Andrea put it: whether it's fear of weight gain, fear of sugar, or fear of "bad" food, fear has no place attached to something as basic as eating — and taking it off the table is the whole point.

About Andrea Palmer: Andrea has been a dietitian since 2007 and has practised from a weight-neutral perspective for most of her career. Based in Wellington, she supports families — including her own — in feeding their kids without making weight the focus, drawing on her own experience raising a selective eater.

Connect with Andrea: https://foodhabits.co.nz/

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch: https://www.intuitiveeating.org/
• The Satter Division of Responsibility in Feeding by Ellyn Satter: https://www.ellynsatterinstitute.org/how-to-feed/division-of-responsibility/

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