What if Hunger Supports Pleasure?

Everyone thinks they need to weigh their food and count calories to lose weight.

Or eat a combination of baked chicken, broccoli and plain brown rice twice a day to see the scale budge.

But in my experience, this is the recipe for relapse.

Maybe you can relate.

Most of my clients have some version of this scenario in their past that left them right back where they started from.

Plus the additional weight that often accompanies an overly restrictive diet.

What if the answer were less in the “what” you eat and more the “how”.

Like a healthy relationship with a man, we are often coming from a predominantly masculine paradigm to begin with- thinking our way through and strategizing to “get” him.

What we really want is to balance our masculine and feminine energies so that we naturally, and authentically, can interact without being reliant on strategies.

What I see most often, in dating, is a woman needing help with new “feminine energy tools” because she doesn’t understand men.

She can’t see how they naturally want to protect, provide and support her which leaves her thinking she needs to “use her feminine energy” to attract (manipulate) them to get what she needs.

The problem is, she also doesn’t understand women and the power she naturally holds within her either.

The feminine energy tools are simply meant to help your nervous system calm down and experience situations differently.

This allows her to relax and she sees his efforts and appreciates them, creating the upward spiral that makes him more willing to “step up” to meet the needs she feels more free to share with him.

Healthy masculine energy always wants to support the feminine in expanding- it feels good to a man to see his woman thriving and happy and in turn, he gets appreciated for anything he adds to that sense of wellbeing.

Seeing her happy is innately satisfying for a healthy man- he needs far less from us than we try to give.

We start over giving and self-sacrificing and then demanding more when we don’t know- or can’t believe- that he’s always trying to contribute to our happiness.

The same is true in health.

Hunger gets sated faster when pleasure is prioritized.

Hunger- our primal need to eat- is masculine in nature.

Very functional and consistent.

Pleasure, however, doesn’t “serve a purpose” it’s just an experience that makes us feel good… in addition to getting our basic needs met(!)

Like a woman that isn’t able to see the mesmerizing effect she has on a man until she actually reveals her vulnerability, she will also have a hard time seeing “diet” food (I mean whole foods here, not ricecakes) as something she can enjoy for the rest of her life.

Until she can see- and feel- what nourishes her, she will bounce from diet to diet, always “dating” the one the leaves her wanting more- or asking her for more.

This over-working and undereating only creates more tension in her body.

The cortisol this cycle continues generating keeps her sleep cycles dysregulated, heart racing, feeling dull or foggy and storing weight in the midsection… further causing her to want to hide instead of feeling her radiance.

Without her body getting what it needs, it will turn against her too and create a rebellious experience that she thinks is a result of “lack of self-control”.

The more we see hunger as a way of supporting pleasure, instead of the other way around, the more likely we will be to move toward a healthy marriage when it comes to our interactions with food.

There isn’t a need to play games and manipulate our hunger when we trust that it’s creating an opportunity for us to feel good… to get our needs met and enhance our wellbeing.

As we start to notice that we won’t be withheld from, we stop feeling the need to play cat and mouse with our hunger.

Pleasure is very feminine in nature.

When “she” (the energy of pleasure) is still childlike, it can create insatiable cravings… the more sugar the better.

As a healthy adult relationship requires emotional maturity, so is the process of marrying hunger and pleasure.

It’s the same inner shift a woman makes when she decides she’s ready to stop attracting (and being attracted to) the men that aren’t moving her toward that lasting love she desires.

This is about integrating the masculine and feminine energy within you so you are able to restore peace and harmony in your eating- and day to day- experiences.

This work has a ripple effect throughout every area of your life.

It takes a little calibration of your system to start to see how enjoyable “healthy” feels but, once you do, you will experience the upward current it creates in your life.

You feel stronger, supported, more confident… willing to be seen.

And this is when clients start to show up differently in their work and relationships with others.

They start owning their needs… and getting them met.

The discomfort they’ve been hearing as a cue to eat dissolves when they start to see clearly how to nourish themselves from the inside out.

This is when the weight stops climbing.

Not because they are on a “diet”, but because they are actually getting what they need to thrive.

The healthy relationship between hunger and pleasure is meeting the needs you naturally have… the ways you’ve been hungry for something you didn’t know you were craving.

It’s a totally different experience coming from a place of security and having your needs being met- feeling nourished- than a place of following the rules.

This is what we discover in my 6 week program, Nourished:

-The unconscious patterns that keep you seeking choosing food that you feel bad about (creating drama in your relationship with food).

-How to eat and when so you can create the most supportive, juicy connection between hunger and pleasure.

-Which rules you need to be breaking so you can create more ease

-How to allow your hormones to help your body come to a place of greater wellbeing

-What consistent actions you need to be taking to keep your tank filled and why you have struggled for so long

-What to actually do with the information you gathered from tracking your food all those years

-Getting the support you need to be successful and trust yourself

-How to keep this relationship growing and sustainable (not boring)

The women that create the best results from this program have a lot of experience with dieting- having lost and gained the same X amount of weight for many years- but have a hard time taking the actions that would support their weight loss goals on an ongoing basis.

They are creative and highly intuitive but often find it hard to put more of their musings into the world, even though they know they are good at what they do. They are naturally generous with their time and energy but find it difficult to prioritize their own wellbeing and feel stuck choosing between taking care of themselves and all the people that depend on them.

Email me (cschandnutrition@gmail.com) with the subject: Nourished if this feel like what you’re looking for. I will ask a few questions to make sure you get what you’re needing and get you signed up!

Love,
Courtney