Welcome!
The fact that you’re here reading this now means the voice inside you is asking to be heard.
And YAY to listening to the whispers of our wise inner wisdom!
Eating Authentically© means eating as an outward expression of how you want to be feeling inside.
It will teach you how to access and embrace what’s true for you, body, mind and soul.
It will bring you back home and re-connect you with the Sovereign Sage in you that already knows what, when and how much to eat.
This is possible, doable and sustainable. You can get on with your life. You can have fun, feel great, eat with pure enjoyment and love the body you live in.
We’re genetically wired to have ALL of this.
It is not a pill, a plan, or a doctrine…thank Goddess.
It is just you, completely and fully connected to trusting, knowing and celebrating the strong healthy woman you are.
It is you, knowing exactly how to read the subtle cues you get every day, with every meal.
And yes, we also release the unnecessary stuff… like the sabotaging cycles of thoughts and behaviors, beliefs and limiting habits you might have.
And we integrate what we discover you need…like friendly structures that make eating well simpler, some neuro – plasticity practice, and some macronutrient and natural metabolism support.
Eating Authentically© is a graceful, simple set of practices and principles of eating that will sustain you for the rest of your life.
Life is long, one size doesn’t fit all, and what serves us best changes over the course of our lives.
Your body, your hunger, your age, the foods that you enjoy, and your metabolism will all change over the course of your life.
This work will give you the tools you’ll need to help you navigate these changes right along with it.
To eat in an authentic way means to eat as a full expression and reflection of how you really want to show up in the world.
Not who you were raised to be.
Not who you sometimes limit yourself as being.
Not who your friends, your partner, or your family think you are.
The self you long to be…the whisper you keep hearing that’s calling you deeper into your Sovereignty, your Sage self.
The one you either keep forgetting…pushing to the background…not believing in.
Enter a large plate of cookies, shame about your body, not looking your boss in the eye when requesting the raise, or staying too long in a low-vibration relationship.
Because we are our bodies, and they are us, literally…
The Eating Authentically© and SoulNourish© work are born of my desire to respond to my own ever louder whisper to step up and show up more powerfully in the areas of food and body image.
I realized I was wasting a tremendous amount of precious energy in chronic low-level distraction and confusion about what/how/when I was eating, and what I looked and felt like in my body and my clothes.
It’s the alchemy of 24 years of fieldwork, research and study – in myself, with incredible clients and small groups of women committed to changing what doesn’t work, and instead creating real, sustainable results.
This is a radically different way of thinking for most of us. It’s a way to re-connect with your own authentic relationship with the food you eat and the body you live in. It’s simple and sustainable. It is a magnificent path, and if you set yourself on it, it will change your life.
You might feel at home here if:
*You’re exhausted with the continuous “deals” you make with yourself, only to become disillusioned, REALLY hungry, and convinced you can’t really do it anyway.
*You’re cycling in and out of eating boring food in the name of “health” that you don’t enjoy and then rebelling by overeating again.
*You’re tired of fighting with yourself over how your body looks and feels.
*You’re so confused by all the conflicting advice you hear that you don’t even know WHAT to eat.
If ANY of this rings true for you, and you’re frustrated and ready for a change, you’re in the right place.
The Problem –
First let’s get clear about the problem.
An overwhelming number of amazingly smart women aren’t enjoying food anymore. We’re either racing through it, or trying (again) the newest strategy in the news to try to get ourselves “under control”, so we won’t eat it.
Most of the time this also means we’re not really enjoying the bodies we’re living in either, whether that’s showing up as excess weight, low energy levels, or pain.
Ponder this:
*Nine out of ten women in the US say they dislike or even hate their bodies.
*Hundreds of books are published each year about nutrition and health, many of them well researched and well written. And yet the most candid and forthright experts freely tell us that even THEY can’t keep up let alone agree amongst themselves how to interpret the huge body of conflicting data and research that’s currently available. It’s little wonder that so many of us are confused……….
*Diet and weight loss is a multi-BILLION dollar industry, yet meta-statistics from the combined recent major studies and research tell us that of the folks who work so very hard to reach or maintain healthy body weight, 94% to 98% of them will not sustain their results long-term. And “long-term” is defined by only 1-2 years! Then for most, the cycle begins all over again…
Clearly, something is begging to be changed here!
Why Traditional Strategies Don’t Work –
First, it’s not your fault. You are not lazy, and you very likely don’t lack willpower. Imbedded in your genetic coding is the natural inclination to eat fast, and to gorge on sugars and fats when they’re available. For 600,00 to a million years, this is what we needed to do in order to survive the whole 12 months of a given year.
These days we’re surrounded with nutritionally weak foods that activate this old cellular memory, which we once needed to keep us alive. The very things the modern world has given us now are being called into question in the fields of nutrition, science and medicine. Almost any day, we can pick up a new article or study citing the increasingly disturbing statistics of obesity, rising health care costs, and women in particular unhappy and unfulfilled with what and how they eat.
Most of us have completely lost touch with our abilities to intuit what we actually want and need along with how to enjoy it, in an era where we’ve got almost unlimited access to sugars and fats. We then try to correct this with an artificial, highly controlled surface-level handling of the problem.
So we try (again) to tell ourselves:
Just use more willpower and control.
Just eat less.
Just exercise more.
Just accept the fact that you can’t enjoy your food
and look amazing at the same time.
Just accept the fact that you don’t like your body.
Just work harder to convince yourself that this is “good” food and that’s “bad” food.
Just a few reasons these strategies don’t work:
They ask us to be less than who we really are.
They require a ton of energy to talk ourselves into continual controlling.
They require us to accept less than what we really want.
They tell us the answers are “out there”- an expert, a list of acceptable foods, a calorie or a point or the newest book your best friend loves.
They all support the absurd idea that someone else must know more than we do about ourselves…
I’m a rebel child, an unabashed lover of pleasure and of great food, and so I just couldn’t accept all that.
I hope you can’t either.
It wasn’t fun, and I take a strong stand for fun in my life.
I hope you do too.
It didn’t work, and I only care to work in ways that bring me lasting results.
I hope that’s true with you, too.
What we’ve been told to do and what we’ve so earnestly been doing isn’t working.
Let’s look at what does.
So what is Eating Authentically©, anyway?
*It’s knowing from the inside exactly what foods would feed your body best, every day, and at every meal.
*It’s a connected relationship with food and body that leaves you nourished, satisfied and happily relaxed each day.
*It’s having the confidence to enjoy and take real pleasure in all of the food you choose to eat, wherever you are, whoever you’re with.
*It’s being so accustomed to feeling good and energetic that you claim the birthright of feeling great in a healthy body you can love.
*It’s taking beautiful care of yourself with deeply nourishing lifelong habits, not because you “should” do them but because they’re now part of who you are.
*It’s learning how to trust yourself completely.
And when these things begin to happen, you will organically and naturally release extra weight if you have it, and you will feel great in your body.
Why Eating Authentically© Works –
At the core of yourself, whoever you are, or think yourself to be right now, you carry incredible intuitive wisdom in your body about how to eat in the best way possible for you, at this particular point in your life. When you let this really sink in, you’ll begin to recognize the magnitude of power here.
It means that with mindful support and guidance as you learn how, you can create a relationship with your food and your body that you honestly love. No compromises, no bargains, no settling for less that what you really want, for life.
It works because it is deeply about you.
Your relationship with your food, whatever this is right now, is here to teach you something about yourself, and this is worthy of your welcoming attention.
It happens when you learn three simple steps:
Embracing
First it’s clearly seeing and unraveling the limiting beliefs that have held you back in the past,
and then clearing them.
Empowering
Next it’s becoming aware of and understanding what’s really happening when you reach
for the third brownie, judge yourself harshly, or space out while you eat.
Embodying
Lastly it’s becoming your own authority, trusting this and standing in it with a graceful confidence,
joy, and celebration.
No more magic quick fixes and surface level control strategies.
No more looking out there for what’s in you.
It works because the only thing telling you what to do is what’s true, what you learn to feel and trust in your body, and what’s happening in your own experience.
And that, Sister, you can trust with all your heart.
Here’s to restoring your natural relationship with eating!
Love,
Marina
Marina Francis EPC, BCT, CRT
