Past IPE Student Video Testimonials

Hi, I’m AnaLisa Rutstein.  Seven years ago when I was 226 pounds, I was miserable.  I was painfully unhappy.  I hated my body.  It felt like my life had no purpose. I felt disconnected from my body and my life.  Food was my go to for everything.  But now things are different.  My mind, body, and soul are in alignment.  I can honestly say that I truly love and accept my body.  Food has become a source nourishment, pleasure, and joy.  And that’s why I feel so strongly that it’s my mission and calling to help other women on their journey with healing their relationship with food, body, and their life.

To me eating psychology is a powerful and transformative approach to understanding and healing one’s relationship within their body. Its understanding that for 31 years in my life I was looking to fill my unmet needs for love, happiness, connection, grounding and self-worth with food.  I was numbing my anxiety, fear, and thoughts of not being good enough by either eating too much or too little, binging or restricting, dieting, compulsive exercise.  You name it, I’ve done it.  All while gaining and losing literally hundreds of pounds while never gaining an ounce of peace or self-acceptance.  I was trying to manage my life and my emotions by controlling my weight and my food intake while at the core is a deep longing to full in myself.

I was forever hoping that if only I was thin enough, make this number on this scale, fit into a certain size of clothing or have no needs or dependencies other than food, I would be okay.  I was disconnected from my body and my life.  Eating psychology to me is the knowledge that our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about food in our body profoundly affect our overall health, happiness, and wellbeing.  Its understanding and working the complicated relationships that we develop towards food, eating, and body image which shows us how our mood, stress level, happiness and taking pleasure in ourselves, our food, and our lives impact our nutritional metabolism.  It shows us how through cultivating being relax.  We can find the wholeness and satisfaction that we’ve been truly hungry for.

It’s important because it fills a void for the majority of us.  We all eat.  We all have relationships with food and our bodies.  But we have never been helped to understand this relationship and how central it is to the fabric of our lives. It’s important because our experience with food is interconnected to so many other areas in our lives, our hopes, our dreams, our fears.  And there is so much pain around eating and people’s relationship with food and their bodies.  Nine out of ten women are unhappy with their weight, shape or looks.  Eight out of ten women are on the diet.  Forty percent of nine-year-old females have been on a diet and over 98% of people who lose weight by dieting gain it back within a year.

How can it help people grow and heal?  It helps move one from an adversarial relationship towards food in one’s body to one of self-acceptance and love by involving the whole person mind, body and spirit.  It places food in our body in a larger context of a balance life where food is a source of nourishment, pleasure, and healing.  Our relationship with food and our body has important messages for us if we slow down and listen to them.  It allow us to see food as a doorway to a deeper relationship with our self and others, as a path to recover our own inner wisdom and potential and as a vital way to be human in life and love in the world.  And to help us become the fullest expression of who we’re meant to be.

Many of us are constantly at a tag of war with food.  We have a love hate relationship with it.  In that we love its aroma and taste but beat ourselves up with negative self-talk for eating it.  Ultimately, our negative self-talk wins out as continuous vicious cycle of dieting, binging, and overeating continues.  So many people, especially women, struggle daily with having a negative body image.  What we eat and when we eat is a reflection of our state of mind, a reflection of our thoughts.  Thoughts are the root of our actions.  Eating psychology is the study of our state of mind, our mental processes in relation to food.

There is a connection between the state of our body, our mind, and our soul.  When these are in balance we gain a state of relaxation.  Eating psychology explores this connection allowing for growth, healing, and reflection along the way.  It focuses on changing our negative state of mind, our negative self-talk and as a result we then begin to change our relationship with food.  When and what we eat, how and when we move, who we attract as friends, these are all mirror of our body, mind, and soul state of being.  These factors affect our metabolism and ultimately the health state of our body.

Have you ever food to assuage one of these emotions?  Eating psychology is important because without addressing the underlying issue which causes us to use food as a crutch, medicine, friend and relaxer we will continue to be in a war with food.   It is important to resolve the negative reasons we use food while increasing our use of food for the purpose of nourishing our body, mind and soul.  When we don’t address the reasons of our negative relationship with food eventually our body breaks down from the abuse and disease manifest itself.

Cancer, diabetes, obesity, all of these are on the rise in our society.  It is more important than ever to educate ourselves and others about the psychology of eating.  When we are not satisfied in an area of our life it creates a misalignment between body, mind, and soul.  Binging, overeating and dieting are symptoms of a misalignment to our life purpose.  If the reason for this misalignment is not addressed then the symptoms will continue to fester and reappear.  Our battle with food will continue.  Lost weight, regained.  Eating psychology focuses on releasing past hurts that present themselves as a negative relationship with food.  When we explore our personal relationship with food, we begin to look deeper into the alignment of body, mind, and soul and toward our life purpose.

In aligning ourselves to our life’s purpose, we begin to grow and heal.  When we heal our past, negative experiences and let go of our future worries and instead leave in the present we are able to relax and enjoy the journey of life while creating a beautiful life story.  Understanding our relationship with food allows us an enormous opportunity for growth in self-aware, respect and self-love.  In psychology it helps us to heal and grow by teaching us to relax and to love and accept ourselves in the present moment of time.  Healing our body, healing our mind, healing our soul.

To me, the psychology of eating is the answer, it’s the key, it is the paramount way to help people solve their problems with food and eating. My name is Staley Sednaoui and I’m a nutritional counsellor in Princeton, New Jersey. I started my practice in 2009 after I graduated from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition in New York.  I was fortunate enough to set up a practice and have clients right away.  And I gained a lot of satisfaction from helping clients make better food choices, learn more about nutrition, help plan meals for their family, how to live in a more beneficial way.

I definitely found in my practice the more I talk to people about food and nutrition the more people talk to me about their struggles with food and eating.  Many of these people I could help.  We could pinpoint where their areas of difficulty were and we could come up with solutions that would help guide them pass their difficulties.  But I always had a handful of clients who I just couldn’t get unstuck.  And no matter how much we work on coming at it from different perspectives we really couldn’t make any progress.  So in my quest to try to help people, I came across the work of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating and Marc David’s books.

So I went out and bought his books and I read them cover to cover, twice. I devoured them because to me it was very very new material.  And it was information that really resonated for me.  So I slowly started putting bits of Marc David’s work into my work of my clients and I began to see people having aha moments.  Client saying to me I never thought about it that way.  I never looked at food and eating that way.  Light bulbs are turning on.  And what I found is the more in incorporated the work of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating, the more my clients began to change.  And the more they began to change with peace, with stillness, with a certain relaxation towards food and eating.  And this is really really important because I think people come to me quite confused about what to eat.  And it’s pretty easy to put people on the track about what they should eat.

But it’s getting people to not stand in front of the refrigeration at 10 o’clock and eat a sleeve of Oreo cookies that’s the real work and everybody struggle with that. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t.  So I have clients who come into see me who are tired of living that way and they’re frustrated.  They’re embarrassed. They’re ashamed.  They’re overweight and they had it.  And once I start introducing the Institute of Psychology work into them in little bits and pieces, it all becomes clear, and they relax and they give up their struggle.  And when they give up the struggle, they find peace.  And when they find peace, the weight comes off.  So tome this is really really important work because it’s helping people find peace, it’s helping people gain better health. I think this curriculum is so important that it should be in high schools. I think young people should really be getting their minds around this issue of food and eating and everyone’s relationships to food and eating.

I think Marc David’s work is incredibly healing because it gets people living their life.  My clients who struggle with food and eating spend too much of their time struggling with food and eating and not enough of their time enjoying their life.  So through this work you can put aside those struggles, understand what your individuals issues are.  Figure out a way to come at the problem.  Solve the problem in a comfortable benign way and go back to enjoying life and enjoying food, which is equally important.

Hi, I’m Sara from Denver, Colorado.  And I am super excited to be sharing with you today my vision and what I believe eating psychology is.  So I’d do my best to get this done 3 to 5 minutes.  So here we go.  So for me, eating psychology this is the future of nutrition and health.  I mean this is it.  This is where the world is going, right now. It’s a very exciting time to be part of something so powerful.  You know years ago when I was in high school I thought wouldn’t it be cool to be an eating psychologist cause I thought it was all about why do certain people crave cookies and cake and pies and sugary food and what makes other people crave salty foods.  And you know that’s what I thought eating psychology was.  Cool, right?  And then I went on and I got my master’s degree in nutrition and exercise physiology, went through my own really serious health kind of crisis and healing for about five years.

I went on and study, eastern medicine, all of these fancy tools that I thought would give me all the tools I need to fix everything with my client.  You know to be there for them.  To give them everything they need.   But the more tools that I learned and the more protocols I’ve learned the more I separated myself from it.  The more I was like you know what.  I don’t identify with it and most of my client don’t identify with it.  And I don’t care if I can give them a perfect protocol and I get all of these answers with their lab results.  If there is something, if it’s a myth or it’s out of line in here it’s going to be a struggle.  And so that’s the biggest missing piece of the puzzle for me is eating psychology piece where you’re teaching people to go back inside and take their power back, to listen to their own inner voice, their intuition.  Which most people are like intuition, what’s that?  I don’t know a thing.  You know I’m just a body and a brain.  That’s about it. I have no spirit.  I have no inner voice.

So eating psychology for me is bringing people back in, back down to earth, back into their body, into their soul and into their spirit and helping them to look at the bigger picture.  How is their life going?  How is the way that they’re relating to food, relating to their life and to their life purpose and to their spirit and to their emotion and to their mentality?  All of that stuff.  They’re all interconnected and related.  So it’s basically giving people the power to come back inside, to get in touch with who they are so that they can powerfully move forward in that direction by following their guidance, their spirit.  And it’s important now more than ever because we’re so disconnected with who we are.  We’ve been taught to ignore to your intuition, ignore your inner voice.  You know if you’re hungry, don’t eat.  Are you crazy?  You’re given a certain amount of calories a day and that’s it.    So if you’re hungry, ignore it. Push through it.  If you’re craving something definitely don’t eat it and then if you do eat feel guilty.  You know beat yourself up because we’re not gentle with ourselves.

So now more than ever we need self-love.  We need to nourish ourselves and we need to slow down.  Slow down people.  Cause we’re rush, rush, go, go.  The more we push the more we, you know, the better we are and if you feel sick just push through it.  Don’t show it.  If you’re tired or you’re sad or you’re upset, overwhelmed, don’t show it.  You know put on a happy face, push through it.  That’s what we’re taught to be one.  We are taught to ignore our inner voice and we’re taught to go, go, go.  Now we need to slow and rest.  Bring relaxation and nourishment and love back into our lives.  Because if we don’t, we’re setting ourselves out for a miserable life and for failure and for you know terrible health and symptoms.  And when we don’t have our health, we don’t have anything.  I saw that with myself and I see that with my clients and it’s so important that we cherish this amazing gift we’ve been giving in our body and this tool that can take us wherever we want to go in life, right.

We can go wherever we want and we can create whatever we want.  And it all starts here with nutrition and with our inner intuition and our body.  I could talk about that forever but next topic.  How can it help people grow and heal?  Well how could it not, right?  If you’re going to grow, you’re going to heal the body, right.  If you choose to heal, you’re going to grow as well.  So if you choose to grow up spiritually or whatever way you wish emotionally, your body will be healthy and will start to heal itself.  If you decide that you want to heal yourself and you want to be proactive and take a stand and make sure that you’re living the best life possible you’re going to grow spiritually and you’re going to grow emotionally and intellectually and every other way possible.  I’ve been there for five years.  I wouldn’t have grown.  I wouldn’t have healed.  I fought it at first.  But once you go with it, everything opens up for you again. I see it with my clients too.  Those that aren’t willing to grow are saying they’re not willing to heal.  So by giving people their inner power back, you’re changing their biochemistry and physiology.

And you’re allowing them to be empowered and to be healthy and be filled with love and that is what will make them happy by giving them that power back.  By saying you know what you know better than anyone what your body needs and what your life and your spirit needs and by giving them that power back you’re changing their life permanently.  No more temporary results, right?  This is going to be a permanent lifelong shift and change to bring joy and love and health into every aspect of their life, not just through nutrition.  So those are my thoughts.  Thank you for sticking with me.  I could go on for this about this stuff.  It’s truly where my heart is.  So I thank you Marc David for bringing this all forward and thank you for watching.  So much love.