The thought of starting an intuitive eating business can be scary and overwhelming.

Even for those that currently have a health business and want to transition to a non-diet business is frightening. Will I be able to sustain my income?

How can I make money off if I’m not selling meal plans, diet programs, detoxes, and cleanse?

If I’m not creating complex protocols for my clients: why would they pay me?

These are the type of questions this article aims to answer and many others.

What is the business of intuitive eating?

Being an Intuitive Eating Coach

Intuitive Eating Coaching Outcome

Serving versus Selling

Who do we serve in an intuitive eating business

First Step to start an intuitive eating business

Non-Diet Business coaching

What is a Non-Diet Mentorship program?

If you would like to listen to the article in audio format the Going Beyond The Food Show – Pro Series Season 1 Episode 2

Links mentioned on the episode

Mentorship Program

Intuitive Eating Guide

 Free Training & resources

Undiet Your Coaching Podcast

What’s an intuitive eating business?

An intuitive eating business is when you exchange money in order to support someone with intuitive eating. This support can come in many different ways:

• Teaching them an intuitive eating framework
• Coaching their learning or progress as an intuitive eater
• Supporting them in their intuitive eating journey
• Encouraging to move forward when they struggle
• Answering their questions
• Inspiring them to move forward in the face of adversity
• Creating products that will support people who want to become an intuitive eater

This business is not a formulated typical health business and does not hold the same value system considering that most health businesses are created to support diet culture ideology.

The most prevalent difference in a diet culture-free business resides in its approach to healing. An intuitive eating business is anchored in what I describe as a “bottom-up” approach versus a “top-down” approach. The goal is to empower you to become your own expert at your body. A typical health business that is rooted in diet culture is built around the provider being the expert and telling you how to engage with your body. Very disempowering.

An intuitive eating business is based on self-compassion, trust, respect of the individual innate body wisdom, and ability to heal themselves.

As of today, the most frequent intuitive eating business model is the coaching business model. You exchange money with your service as a coach.

Intuitive Eating Coach Business

As an intuitive eating coach, you are healing your client/ or patient… they heal themselves. Your clients/patients have all they need to heal their own relationship with food and body. For many, that’s a departure from their professional training… it’s ok to feel unsafe at first.

An intuitive eating coach is a health professional who guides clients/patients in their recovery from Diet Culture. Moreover, your job is to guide clients on the path of becoming an intuitive eater by listening to their concerns and helping them with problem-solving. Recognizing what we spoke about in the first episode of season 1 of Undiet Your Coaching Podcast, that the human relationship to food is by far more complex than just simple food choices.

Problem-solving with your client as an intuitive eating coach will not require you to provide a complex meal plan or macro ratio. Instead, helping them master their mindset particularly shifting away from diet mindset towards a compassionate mindset.

You will help your client move from an external cue to know what to eat, when to eat, and how to eat towards internal cues. As well as helping them feel their hunger, fullness and find satisfaction in what they eat. Instead of teaching your clients to suppress their cravings and how to “fill up on aid food”, you actually help them be in their body at the moment.

You help them understand that all food is good. That being healthy doesn’t mean being restrictive and feeling deprived. That they no longer need to earn their food. You empower your clients, give themselves permission to eat.

Intuitive Eating Coaching Outcome

Your goal is to coach your clients in building confidence in their own eating cues to be their own internal nutritionist. Instead of helping your client live a “normal life” in a very restrictive dietary protocol and how to make cauliflower brownie, you help your client give themselves permission to eat.

With compassion, you guide your client to cope with emotions differently. Helping them build resilience and emotional intelligence. Helping them learn to process their emotions without food.

As your clients build trust and respect with their innate body wisdom, you help them detach from being their bodies and their appearance. In addition, helping them reconnect to their innate worth as women. Guiding your client away from shame towards neutrality. Helping them embrace self-care beyond their physical bodies.

Finally, you help educate your client to a weight-neutral health approach guided by health at every size principle. Moving their body with joy and practicing gentle nutrition.

Being an effective intuitive eating coach requires you to be an intuitive eater first with a willingness to grow and learn from your clients. You must possess intuitive eating professional skills but also, mindset coaching skills, behaviour modification skills. Also, mindfulness and body image resilience skills.

Serving versus Selling

Let’s talk about what everyone thinks about but doesn’t want to talk about. It’s going to get uncomfortable for some…

It’s ok to be making money coaching intuitive eating, to exchange your coaching services for money. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be successful in your intuitive eating business. It’s ok to monetize your professional skills.

Ready for this one: The more revenue you create, the more money you make in your intuitive eating business means more people freed from diet culture. Yup, it truly is.

Now, how you monetize your services and create business revenue does matter. You can build a business in a masculine, patriarchal way or you can choose to embrace your female energy that empowers everyone even those who do not purchase from you.

You can serve instead of selling. Serving means engaging with our clients without expectation. You offer value by creating free content, teaching your audience the very basics of intuitive eating, providing free resources to everyone. You become a resource helping people break down their own barriers, fears, and supporting them with an empowering message. Guiding them to the next level resources available.

The opposite of serving is the hard sell, aggressive to close mentality that comes across as pushy and self- focused. When you are focus on selling, you create free resources guard to disempower people so they are led to believe that the only way for them or resolve their problem is by buying your product.

Serving is based on love. Selling is based on fear. Serving leads to selling without selling.

Who do we serve in an intuitive eating business

We must recognize that the intuitive eating model of nutrition is not accepted by the traditional model of healthcare. As a result, intuitive eating services are mostly never covered by traditional insurance providers. Our services are typically private care, meaning an out of the pocket expense.

This is why most intuitive eating professionals have to be entrepreneurs alongside their profession. You can provide service for someone else’s business but in most cases, you will need to be running your own business.

This means that you need to embrace entrepreneurship and learn about setting up and maintaining a business, marketing your intuitive eating business as well as getting and retaining clients.

Let’s make something clear here: a professional health certification isn’t how you will learn to run a business. The vast majority of health certifications do not include business training and if they do, it’s not focused on a non-diet business model but instead a model that supports diet culture.

That’s why I created the  Non-Diet Coaching Certification program. If we want to be successful in dismantling diet culture, I need you to know how to successfully operate a business.

First Step to start an intuitive eating business

The first place to start is with a business strategy. That’s you creating a brand-new business of transitioning your current business to an intuitive eating business model, you need a business strategy.

The strategy is what will turn your passion into biz and blow you to impact thousands of women. It’s the roadmap you will look up to as you work day-to-day in your business. Your business strategy consists of the following:

• Why
• What
• Who
• Where
• When and the…
• How much

The first layer of your business strategy that we teach is the why… not the what. This is where most business strategies go wrong. The business you create needs to be in alignment with your personal values, your personal goals, and how YOU want to lead your personal life.

To be an effective heart-centred intuitive eating business owner, you must care for yourself first. Make sure your business supports YOU not the opposite.

Non-Diet Business Coaching

Today, I own and operate a very successful intuitive eating business. It’s not always been like this. In this first episode of the PRO Series podcast, I share the story of my own professional and business evolution.

It took time and resources for me to get where I’m today. For over 4 years, I searched and trained in various professional training programs to create the Going Beyond The Food Method. I shared more on this in this podcast episode.

Although I had 15 years of retail business operation experience, I also had to learn the health business model. I had to educate myself, get coached in my blind spot, be mentored. Over the last 10 years, I invested approximately $60,000 in my business.

• I hired an experienced nutrition business coach before even graduating -8K
• The year following my graduation, I committed my first health business mastermind -10K
• 4 years ago, I hired an online business coach to help me transition my business online – 10K
• Over the next years, I have purchased 26k in online business skills courses to learn email marketing, funnel, summit, branding, etc…

Non-Diet Coaching Certification  Program

The Going Beyond The Food non-diet coaching certification program is a space where you can receive support guidance to become the best intuitive eating professional. It’s a program geared to refine your professional skills set and teach you the skills you need to build a successful business that can impact thousands of women.

It helps you develop as a powerful leader and help other women come back to their power. You learn how to harness your ability to support and help other women. As a result, you can impact thousands of other women and dismantle diet culture.

I believe that the only way for us to be able to end diet culture oppression of women is by us women coming together and helping each other as women back into our power via intuitive eating and body neutrality. This is a woman issue…that must be resolved by women.

As women, we need to step up and change the future for the young generation of girls. We need to teach them that they aren’t defined by their bodies, we need to crush DC so it never gets its dirty hands on the upcoming generation.

The liberation of the upcoming generation will only come through our generation’s liberation from diet culture and patriarchy.

Currently, the traditional model of nutrition, coaching, and even health care is not set-up for this…it’s entrenched in diet culture. Most of the wellness industry is deeply entrenched in diet culture. The alternative health industry claims to be about the root cause… but never looked at the reason why women engage with food and body.

Bottom line we need a new approach

We need women who can help other women change their relationship to food and body, empowering women to become their own experts at their bodies, to help women build confidence in themselves and their power to know what’s right for them.

Women who will support other women. We need emphatic, compassionate women who have the skills to connect with other women and a passion for change.

My job is to ensure these women are doing their job so well while creating a sustainable business so they can keep impacting more women for years to come. Furthermore, my job is to ensure that these women are successful so they crush diet culture for the generations to come.

I help women with intuitive eating mentorship programs today but it wasn’t always so…

8 years ago, I was 2 years into my nutrition practice, Carolyn walked into my office. And she had just been diagnosed with high blood pressure and high cholesterol. She desired to be “healthier”.

I proceeded to take a diligent intake. And this intake process included a food journal, detailed health history as well as a symptomology assessment. Based on my assessment I concluded that a “whole food diet” would support her goals.  Along with other lifestyle modifications.

Not only how I was teaching nutrition different but also my approach. So Carolyn would add foods to her plate instead of removing foods. Carolyn left my clinic with her food list, food journal and “ideal plate” handout in hands.

Then two weeks later she was back for a follow-up. Within 10 minutes, she was in tears.

“I’m so sorry Stephanie I wasn’t able to follow what you told me to do and thought this time would be different. My urges to binge on processed food at night are back in full force. “

“I ate my kids’ food in secret.  What is wrong is wrong with me??”

Are we causing harm to our clients?

Shifting to a non-diet approach to health

The Going Beyond The Food Method™️

Intuitive Eating Mentorship

Non-Diet Professional Training

Non-Diet Business Coaching

How to Get Started

If you would like to listen to the article in audio format the Going Beyond The Food Show – Pro Series Season 1 Episode 1

Links mentioned on the episode

PRO Series – Free Training & resources

Non-Diet Coaching Certification

Intuitive Eating Guide

Are we causing harm to our clients?

We do not know what we do not know.

I was aggravating an underlying condition for Caroline.  Not only did Carolyn had a disordered relationship with food but also with her body image due to years of chronic dieting. And all of my assessment tools and training never accounted for this condition. I was neither taught to assess how patient-related to food or to consider past dieting behavior in my assessment.

Fast forward 8 years later. When I reflected back on my first few years of practice not only most of my female clients were in fact in a disordered relationship with food but I also was.

Most nutrition experts engage in disordered eating

In 2012, an international study in 14 countries found a whopping 77 percent of nutrition students felt that eating disorders were a concern among their peers. And the reasons behind this are complicated: theories run from an obsessive overexposure to information about food and exercise, to pressure within degrees to be an “ideal nutritionist.”

Individuals that develop disordered eating may at first initiate a quest for a healthier lifestyle but then dysfunctional, compulsive beliefs about food emerge that then impair health, work, and social functioning.

If you are curious to know if have a disordered relationship to food then you should complete our free professional Non-Diet Coaching intake forms. Assess yourself and share your results with us!

Shifting to a non-diet approach to health

Carolyn was the most impactful client-practitioner I have had to this day.

Not only did she triggered in me a must needed professional shift but also a personal transformation. So my quest for another way of serving my client and healing myself began with her.

7 years ago when I searched for support, training and non-diet coaching certification nothing existed. Instead, I read the Health At Avery Size® research and book by Dr. Lindo Bacon.  And then began applying a weight-neutral approach to health in my practice.

Over the next 4 years, I collected both a variety of professional and personal skills. This collection of tools is today known as The Going Beyond The Food Method™️. And this non-diet methodology is currently taught in Undiet Your Life Coaching Program

The Going Beyond The Food Method™

The Going Beyond The Food Method™️ is a way of working with clients and patients which removes that emphasis and pressure to eat for weight loss or health. Instead, it embraces the Health At Every Size® weight-neutral approach to health, intuitive eating, body neutrality, mindfulness, and a self-coaching mindset.

This non-diet methodology respects the fact that each human has innate body wisdom. And that our the body knows what we need and what is best for us including food, eating, movement, weight, and self-care.

A practitioner who uses our methodology is focused on helping women rebuild a relationship of trust, respect, and neutrality with their bodies.The client is empowered to identify what will be best for her to optimize their own health and wellbeing.

At the core, a holistic based approach recognizing the 4 human bodies: mental, emotional, spiritual and physical human bodies. This non-diet approach for health coaches, nutritionists or any other health experts is a gentle process. And it focuses on skills building.

Ultimately, it’s about helping women conquer back their power and thrive unconditionally!

Intuitive Eating Mentorship

The Going Beyond The Food Mentorship program is an intuitive eating mentorship program, an anti-diet training and body image professional training. And it’s designed to support health professionals desiring to shift their practice to a non-diet model.

This is what I was seeking but couldn’t find years ago.

As a professional, a non-diet approach to health and nutrition can be scary as it empowers your client and patient to be their own health expert.

Non-Diet Coaching Professional Training

“If we are not going to hand out meal plans and “good and bad” food list, what will we do?”

That is a very common question and also a great starting point to understand which professional skills set will be required in a non-diet approach.

Food choices and healthy habits aren’t only derived from intellectual knowledge but also from our emotions and thoughts. This applied not only to healthy habits but to every habit we choose to do as a human.

As a non-diet practitioner, you will need to help with your clients with the mindset and emotional intelligence tools. We teach self-coaching for intuitive eating.

Chronic dieters and women who dislike their bodies are in their head instead of their bodies. You will need to help them come back into their body and to connect to their bodily sensation including their eating cues. Mindfulness is the perfect tool to cultivate body attunement.

Intuitive Eating Training

Intuitive eating is a well- researched and complete framework to help you reframe the before, during and after relationship to food with women. As a certified Intuitive eating counselor, I have studied directly with Evelyn Tribole and now included this empowering framework with all my clients in our non-diet online training.

As a non-diet professional, your skills wouldn’t be complete without a tool you can use to help your clients to heal their relationship with their body image.

Body Neutrality is the framework I have selected to teach in our program. It helps women understand that we aren’t defined by own physical bodies. This body image professional training goal is to respect and accept your body for what it is – and that’s it.

Non-Diet Business Coaching

Shifting your business to an anti-diet business model requires some small business adjustment mainly in the content of your professional services, health programs, and marketing.

Your intuitive eating business skills will require you to move to a serving message from selling messages. Your future client or patient will need to be educated about what is a non-diet and weight-neutral approach to health.

The 5-step process to build a successful Anti-Diet Business

1. Determine the non-diet business format that will support your personal goals

2. Define & refine your ideal clients and their needs

3. Create a non-diet service offer.

4. Market your offer or product using our exclusive non-diet transformation funnel system.

5. Deliver your product.

Bonus – Scale & Diversify

How to Get Started

We have created for you a number of free intuitive eating mentorship training resources to help you begin your research in the field of non-diet approach to health.

You can access this non-diet professional training by clicking here.

You will find non-diet online training, webinars, podcasts, and articles.

One last thing

Here’s the truth: As long as you teach any labelled diet (Keto, paleo, GF, DF, ….) and or handout food list and meal plan, you aren’t teaching sustainable health or nutrition. Point.

If the above is you, just about now you’re likely pissed at me. That’s ok sister! I get it. I was on the receiving end of this exact discourse about 4 years ago and I was mad but it planted a seed in my mind… and here I’m today!

It’s not your fault. As far as I know, today…no nutrition school or health coaching program currently offers Intuitive eating as part of their curriculum. So how were you supposed to know??

But now you know…. So, what will you do? Continue to arm people teaching diets or learn intuitive eating for yourself and slowly, gradually integrate it in your practice and help your client real sustainable changes.

It’s your choice. If you choose to opt-out of diet culture, we can help you in your journey.

We do not know what we do not know.

Most nutrition experts engage in disordered eating.

Individuals that develop disordered eating may at first initiate a quest for a healthier lifestyle but then dysfunctional, compulsive beliefs about food emerge that then impair health, work, and social functioning. If you are curious to know if have a disordered relationship to food then you should complete our free professional intuitive eating intake forms. Assess yourself and share your results with us!

” image-0=”” headline-1=”h2″ question-1=”How did I shift to a non-diet approach to health?” answer-1=”

7 years ago when I searched for support, training and non-diet professional mentorship nothing existed. Instead, I read the Health At Avery Size® research and book by Dr. Lindo Bacon.  And then began applying a weight-neutral approach to health in my practice.

Over the next 4 years, I collected both a variety of professional and personal skills. This collection of tools is today known as The Going Beyond The Food Method™️. And this non-diet methodology is currently taught in Going Beyond The Food Academy.

” image-1=”” headline-2=”h2″ question-2=”What is The Going Beyond The Food Method™️?” answer-2=”

It is a way of working with clients and patients which removes that emphasis and pressure to eat for weight loss or health.

Embraces the Health At Every Size® weight-neutral approach to health, intuitive eating, body neutrality, mindfulness, and a self-coaching mindset.

This non-diet methodology respects the fact that each human has innate body wisdom. And that our the body knows what we need and what is best for us including food, eating, movement, weight, and self-care.

At the core, a holistic based approach recognizing the 4 human bodies: mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical human bodies.

Ultimately, it’s about helping women conquer back their power and thrive unconditionally!

” image-2=”” headline-3=”h2″ question-3=”Intuitive Eating Mentorship” answer-3=”The Going Beyond The Food Mentorship program is an intuitive eating mentorship program, an anti-diet training, and body image professional training. And it’s designed to support health professionals desiring to shift their practice to a non-diet model.” image-3=”” headline-4=”h2″ question-4=”Non-diet Professional Training ” answer-4=”

“If we are not going to hand out meal plans and “good and bad” food list, what will we do?”

That is a very common question and also a great starting point to understand which professional skills set will be required in a non-diet approach.

As a non-diet practitioner, you will need to help with your clients with the mindset and emotional intelligence tools. We teach self-coaching for intuitive eating.

” image-4=”” headline-5=”h2″ question-5=”Non-diet Business Coaching” answer-5=”

Shifting your business to an anti-diet business model requires some small business adjustment mainly in the content of your professional services, health programs, and marketing.

Your intuitive eating business skills will require you to move to a serving message from selling messages. Your future client or patient will need to be educated about what is a non-diet and weight-neutral approach to health.

” image-5=”” headline-6=”h2″ question-6=”How to get started?” answer-6=”

We have created for you a number of free intuitive eating mentorship training resources to help you begin your research in the field of non-diet approach to health.

Visit our Non-Diet Professional Training page and you will find non-diet online training, webinars, podcasts, and articles.

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