Eating with Intuition with Lucia Hawley
Type of activity: Eating with intuition
TL;DR my experience:
Lucia is someone who supports you in your health and nutrition goals, no matter what they are. Reframing the way I see food and reevaluating the structures behind WHY I eat the way I do has helped me transform into a healthier and better person.
Check out all her listings, podcasts and programs. They helped me and they can help you!
Get in touch with Lucia:
luciahawley.com (health and business coaching)
Devoured: The Podcast (Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and all major podcast platforms)
www.essentialomnivore.com (Gluten-free recipe collection)
Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/luciahawley_
Hop on Lucia’s newsletter for weekly insights.
Here’s what happened!
I met Lucia a year ago on the recommendation of a friend. I was nervous but I wanted to achieve one thing: a healthier lifestyle.
Not skinnier, necessarily. I was interested in systems that would support a healthier lifestyle for the rest of my life.
It’s been several years since my first consultation with Lucia and I still love having check-ins with her.
She has always been able to reframe and disrupt the narrative I have going in my head about my health, or oftentimes, my (what I perceive as) not so healthy lifestyle choices.
This year has been stressful. I bought my first house, launched URBeginnerWitch, my apartment flooded, my new house needed a lot of attention, and work has been a beast. So, when Lucia and I logged in for our check-in, I burst into tears.
I felt like I was FAILING. The whole point of my work over the last few years was to have structures in place so that when life got crazy and overwhelming at least I would have healthy eating strategies in place to fall back on.
And during this year, those strategies ALL fell by the wayside.
Lucia patiently and compassionately listened to me bemoan how busy and crazy my life is, and how disappointed I was that I couldn’t rely on the habits I had diligently formed over the last few years.
Then she hit me with the wisdom — maybe the structures I built weren’t serving me during this time. Maybe they were hindering me and making me feel more stressed out.
LIGHT BULB MOMENT!
Instead of feeling like a failure, it was crucial that I cut myself some slack. I needed to be reminded that it was okay if the structures I put in place weren’t working. It was about reframing with compassion.
That’s what Lucia brings to every session, recipe or podcast: a gentle reframing and a way through so that you know that no matter what happens, it’s going to be ok. Food and eating are supposed to be joyful, not a burdensome task surrounded by dread. How do you love and support yourself more while you’re trying to achieve your goals and be healthier?
If this resonates with you, I would recommend giving yourself the gift of working with Lucia.
Get to know Lucia in 5 shortish questions
Hey! I’m Lucia Hawley, a functional nutrition therapy practitioner (FNTP) with my master’s in social work, clinical mental health (MSW). I coach women on how to fearlessly make the move society tells them they can’t, from their bodies to their businesses.
Fun facts: I’m left-handed, a Taurus, Year of the Snake, Enneagram 9w8, and a lover of all things #woo. Homeschooled, to boot. Graduated college at 20 and I still like sitting in circles over rows.
How did you find out about eating with intuition?
I came to learn about nutrition because of my own desire to support myself and my health back in 2008. By removing gluten from my diet, I stopped having panic attacks within two weeks. My mind was blown, and I knew that if I could help anyone who had felt as ashamed, overwhelmed or confused by what their bodies were doing… then I was in the right field.
Since then, my role in supporting women with their nutrition has shifted and I serve my community based on the following: helping women see what THEY want in their lives, unapologetically… and stepping into being the person who has all of that and so much more in her life by taking 100% responsibility for every choice she’s making in her life.
How this works with food:
Want to lose weight? Yes, you can create the changes necessary in your life in order to have this easily and readily be part of who you are.
Want to gain weight? Totes — same rules apply.
Want to never talk about weight gain, loss, maintenance or any of that ever again, and you want to create your scope of wellness that blows the old dialogues out the window?
We do that, together.
THAT’S my definition of eating with intuition… because as Geneen Roth says, the way you eat is the way you live.
How is eating with intuition different than a regular ol’ diet?
Eating with intuition and intention means that we accept full responsibility for our choices — I have yet to see a diet marketed for improved health or wellness markers that takes the importance of getting the emotional side of our brains (the right side) on board with change, while also taking into account and building a strong bridge from the right side over to the analytical side of our brains (the left side).
Conventional dieting is only an analytical, left side approach. The diets make sense on paper. We calculate our calories, or points, or macros, or mealtimes, or snacks, or rules, or percentages of organic versus non or whatever else we can quantify.
But we miss the part that applies to our lives — the emotional, right side of our brains must be on board.
If our right side of the brain isn’t on board? Well, that’s why dieting fails us. WE fail dieting, actually, and it’s why the dieting industry makes major money every year. The diets were built to fail, our physiologies were built to burn out on solely analytical tasks, and if we don’t get our true intuition on board, if we don’t fully liberates our WHOLE selves… then the cycle of dieting will continue.
Great for industry! Not so great for our souls and spirits.
What’s the biggest misconception people have about eating with intuition?
Many! That by eating intuitively, you can’t reach specific goals for your wellness. In fact, that having a goal and being intuitive with your health cannot occur at the same time. There’s nothing further from the truth!
While there’s an incredible movement occurring right now, distancing away from diet culture rhetoric… there’s now an upsurge in what I would call an anti-diet culture.
But, here’s the rub.
When you identify as “anti”, guess what? You’re still thinking about the thing you’re anti.
It’s still central to your thoughts.
So to move away, through and beyond dieting, we must encourage a full acceptance OF dieting.
Oof.
The truth hurts, huh?
How can people incorporate intuitive eating into their spiritual practice?
That’s such a great question, because it’s super easy to bring eating with intuition into spirituality — they 100% support one another, always.
Here’s the thing with eating with intention and intuitively: this IS eating spiritually. You did it. Mission accomplished, and you didn’t even break a sweat!
So to bring eating with intuition into a spiritual practice, I encourage those I work with to connect with their breath. To come into their parasympathetic (rest and digest) mode. So much magic happens here, and in our current society, most of us are navigating our days in our stress mode.
Which, listen. Magic happens in our stress mode, too! We have it for a reason. But ideally, we react to acute stressors, then they’re gone and done and we’re back to parasympathetic mode. In practice, think about our society: jobs we choose to feel stuck in, financial situations we feel we cannot overcome, morning commutes we’ve chosen that leave us chronically stressed, overwhelmed, and not aligned with our deeper selves.
So — taking 10 deep belly breaths with our meals is the most simple, most true, and most powerful way to signal to ourselves that we’re OK, we’re allowed to focus on our meals and by making this simple switch? So much opens up for us.
Add to this practice what you already love from your own spiritual practices, too. Have a crystal that supports your feelings of calm and peace? Bring it to meals. Do you play a certain soundtrack when you offer yourself readings? Maybe that bleeds over to mealtime, or you’re inspired to create a playlist that intuitively serves you while you’re with your meals.
The power that comes from this may seem too easy to believe. Breathe and play music as spirituality??
But, isn’t that just it? Simple doesn’t necessarily equate to easy, as any of you may have already noticed with your own spiritual practices.
And that’s the beautiful part.
So — go forth and allow your breath to open up and shake up meal time! And remember: our bodies, brains and spirits were created to radically coexist with one another. ❤
Get in touch with Lucia!
luciahawley.com (health and business coaching)
Devoured: The Podcast (Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and all major podcast platforms)
www.essentialomnivore.com (Gluten-free recipe collection)
Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/luciahawley_
Hop on Lucia’s newsletter for weekly insights.
