Welcome, friends.

Bienvenidos, amigos y amigas.

I eat what I need.

I feel what I feel.

0044 7505 707 963 ieatwhatineed@gmail.com

What happens when a mother and daughter come together to heal their disordered eating and body image issues?

I eat what I need (IEWIN) is what happens. A supportive community of curious individuals who want to explore their relationship with food and body.

We want you to feel free to eat what you need and enjoy the body you have, now.

Emily and Jan are experienced teachers and facilitators with decades of experience in education and healthcare. We teach 4 key practices to guide people to greater health and wellbeing:

We go LIVE on our Facebook page every Monday morning at 8am UK time. Join us each week to talk about healing food/body issue alongside living a real and messy human life.

Visit our VIDEO LIBRARY on Facebook to get a feel for who we are and how we work with our IEWIN community.

What our community say about IEWIN

What does IEWIN mean to you?

What would you say to somebody curious about IEWIN but isn’t sure it’s for them?

What didn’t you know that you know now, thanks to IEWIN?

FAQs

SO…IS THIS LIKE A DIET CLUB?

Many of our community have spent years in diet clubs - some even started going as children alongside their mothers and aunties.  Dieting - the pursuit of weight loss through adhering to a plan or regime - is a huge waste of our time and energy.  Diets have been proven to fail for the vast majority of people; indeed you’re more likely to gain weight as a result of dieting. We see dieting and diet culture as one of the primary causes of disordered eating.  One of the first steps in our recovery is to recognise that focusing on weight loss is a massive red herring and does nothing to tackle the root causes of our food/body issues.

WHAT’S YOGA AND MEDITATION GOT TO DO WITH DISORDERED EATING?

We believe that the root cause of disordered eating behaviour lies in our disconnection from our bodies. The vast majority of us are born with the potential to be easy-going, natural eaters. We have a brain and a digestive system, vagus nerve that connects them. Our brains and bellies are communicating all the time, beneath our conscious awareness. The physical sensations we feel there (hunger, thirst, fullness, nausea, bloating...) are sign-posts that can inform our eating choices, if we do the brave work of relearning how to tune in and listen to these signals. The yoga, meditation and breathwork we do provides opportunities to practise going inside and tuning into our bodies so that, given time and practice, we can eat what we need without using control or willpower.

IS IEWIN A DIET? WILL I LOSE WEIGHT?

IEWIN is a set of guiding principles (The Process) and practices (yoga, meditation, plant-based eating, circle work) that are designed to support each person’s individual journey of change and growth. IEWIN is not a diet. We will never tell you what to eat. We will never weigh you. We don’t believe in one-size-fits-all solutions. We believe in creating the space for people to connect with how they feel inside, so they are empowered enough to move forward in their own lives from a place of reconnection with their inner wisdom. 

Your body may change shape during this process. You may get bigger or smaller. Our bodies change shape because of a whole host of interconnecting factors (genetic inheritance, sleep patterns, stress, socio-economic environment, hormone levels, cultural norms...), many of which lie beyond our conscious control. Letting go of trying (and usually failing) to control our weight is an important step in the recovery journey. 

MY DOCTOR SAYS I NEED TO LOSE 3 STONE, CAN YOU HELP ME WITH THAT?

When it comes to health, we can pursue supportive and healthy practices without focusing on weight loss or gain. It’s important that we do this because, as many of us have found in our own lives, focusing on weight loss doomed us to failure time and time again. Not only does diet culture set us up to fail, it is also flawed in that weight is not an accurate indicator of health. You can be fat and healthy. You can be thin and healthy. The little known but well documented “obesity paradox” shows that people living in bigger bodies can be metabolically healthy.

Body diversity is a fact. Despite what the media portrays, people simply come in all shapes and sizes. And health - physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health - is a multi-faceted aspect of our humanity. Our holistic health never improves when we shame, blame or condemn ourselves for simply existing as we are in the world.

A weight-neutral approach to health is advocated by Dr Linda Bacon of Health At Every Size. Educating yourself about the evidence basis for HAES is the first step in reclaiming your mental and physical health when everyone is telling you to ‘just lose the weight’. 

Armed with the knowledge that your mental health and wellbeing is just as important as your physical health, you can begin the important work of rooting out internalised fat phobia and practising acceptance of the body you have, now. This acceptance lays the foundation for our mental wellbeing and the potential for real, sustainable change.

WHAT CAN I EAT? WHAT CAN’T I EAT?

You can eat anything you want. You’re in charge. You can eat animal products. Or you can eat vegetarian or vegan food. You can eat whole, natural, unprocessed foods. You can eat convenience and fast food. You can combine the two. You can eat as much as you want, when you want. What we have learned, and what we now teach, is that prioritising real food over processed food is essential to our physical and emotional health. So we learned to cook and eat more plants, as real food nourished our bodies and made us feel calmer and safer. However, trying to completely abstain from all forms of processed food was also bad for our mental health. We felt restricted and unable to participate in every day life in a world where most people eat differently to us. 

So now we make choices each day, in accordance with how we feel in our belly space. Sometimes we eat too much and our bellies hurt. Sometimes we experience deep craving. However, as we practise The Process on a daily basis, we have come to know that craving and overeating are signposts that we need to connect with ourselves and find a deeper reason for our overeating behaviour. 

IS THIS LIKE MINDFUL EATING?

We share many principles with the mindful and intuitive eating movements. Mindful eating invites us to be consciously present to our eating experience. An intuitive eater is defined by the founders of the movement, Tribole and Resch, as someone who “makes food choices without experiencing guilt or an ethical dilemma, honours hunger, respects fullness and enjoys the pleasure of eating.” At IEWIN we recognise that we were all born with this potential, our natural eater. 

You probably know people who have always eaten what they wanted, without guilt or obsession, and who feel happy in their bodies. These people are not the norm these days, as despite the daily barrage of toxic messages from corporations about our eating and our bodies, they have preserved the treasure of their babyhood: the capacity to eat to fullness, to take it or leave it when it comes to food, to enjoy moving their body, to feel comfortable in their size. 

Natural eaters do not need discipline, willpower, or self-control. Beneath their conscious awareness, the systems that regulate their appetite and satiety continue to function as they were always designed to. The Process and our 4 key practices are a pathway to return to our roots as natural eaters. We believe it’s fully possible to return to natural eating if we commit to a daily practice of coming home to ourselves. It’s an inside job.

We also know from first hand experience that when we have habitually used food to numb ourselves and zone out, learning to eat in a conscious way is a huge 180 degree u-turn in behaviour. We used eating as an escape route from reality. Now we are being asked to connect with ourselves and feel our bodies as we eat and digest. We do not expect that people will immediately be able to eat mindfully, intuitively, or naturally. This was certainly not the case in our own recovery.

I’VE GOT INJURIES AND MOBILITY ISSUES, CAN I STILL DO YOGA?

Absolutely. We’ve worked with people who cannot get up and down off the floor, who have chronic pain, who are terminally ill. Just like our approach to eating, when it comes to movement we can choose to move in different ways that make our unique body feel good. If we have an injury or mobility issue, we’ll need to do the practice differently from other people. That’s ok. The yoga we teach is not athletic and is suitable for ALL bodies. We teach meditation lying down or reclining in a chair because we know that it’s hard for many people to sit comfortably on the floor. During circle work we can also make ourselves comfortable in any way that suits us. Prioritising the comfort of your unique body is an important way to show your body that you are listening to how you feel inside.

HOW CAN I TRANSITION TO PLANT-BASED EATING? ISN’T THAT JUST ANOTHER DIET?

We realise that advocating for a particular way of eating could be seen as just yet another diet in disguise. Plant-based eating, as we practise it, is not restrictive. You can continue to eat animal products, processed food, indeed anything you want, and still explore the healing powers of plants. It’s about including more of what’s good for our bodies and our holistic health rather than removing anything that we are not yet ready to let go of.

Nutritionists and dieticians simply cannot agree on anything. Should you go low or high carb? Low or high fat? Paleo? Juicing? We have researched nutritional science, and each diet seems backed by a whole host of studies. Type II diabetes is an interesting example of a condition that has been shown to be treatable with completely different nutritional approaches - some getting excellent results with high fat, low carb diets, others getting similarly impressive results with high carb (in the form of fruits and veggies), low-fat diets. 

How can it be possible to treat the same disease with a completely different nutritional approach? Because different bodies digest and metabolise the same foods differently. What is potentially harmful for you may be no problem for someone else, and vice-versa.  We each have a unique gut microbiome, which has been shaped by the life we have lived thus far, and the genetic inheritance from our ancestors. 

The ONE THING all dieticians and nutritionists can agree on is that favouring REAL FOOD, that’s whole foods that come from nature, benefits all of us, because we come from nature too. Expecting to be able to feel wholesome and healthy, whilst rarely eating any fruits or vegetables, simply isn’t possible. So no, we’re not dieting. But we are eating more plants in the form of whole fruits and vegetables because we know that plants have the potential to nourish, sustain and even heal our bodies.

IS THIS GROUP JUST FOR WOMEN? IS IT JUST FOR PEOPLE WITH FOOD ISSUES?

Our work seems to attract a lot of women - food/body issues are certainly more prevalent among women - but we love working with men who resonate with our approach. We have also found that people without food/body issues can really benefit from our principles and practices. Perhaps you don’t have a problem with food, but you recognise similar issues around alcohol, smoking, drugs, shopping, or co-dependent relationships?  The Process can be applied to any unsupportive behaviour that you wish to transform. Anyone who’s curious about how to live a healthy life in a more conscious way is way is welcome to join us.