The Role of Embodiment in Nutrition Counseling: Part 2a

In Part 1, we explored an introduction to embodiment when applied to nourishing our bodies. Noticing hunger, fullness, fatigue, and other bodily cues gives us information about our needs, and paying attention to them builds awareness over time. Moreover, sensing and feeling inside our bodies can guide us on how to respond with care.

For example, that 3 pm tension headache you get? While several factors may trigger that, what would it be like to pause to assess the need for hydration, a snack, or fresh air (or all of the above)? 

This is all part of the art and science of living in a body — noticing what's happening inside, understanding how those signals connect to your needs, and responding with care rather than criticism or control.

Embodied Nutrition rests on four key foundations that address ways to reconnect with our bodies, understand the systems within and around us, and find steadier ground in our relationship with food.

1. Arriving (or Grounding) in our bodies

2. Building Connection and Trust

3. Understanding our Body as a System...

4. ....Within a System (Nutrition in Context)

These foundations are based on embodiment research, somatic psychology, my public health background, and hands-on clinical experience from the past 10 years. In this post, we'll focus on the first two, which are direct, experiential practices that form the basis of embodied eating.

1. Arriving: The Gateway to Embodiment

How often have you gone from task to task during the day, only to realize (almost before it’s too late) that you need to use the restroom? Or, how about when you had a rushed lunch at your desk, only to be hit with disappointment that you've already had your last bite? 

Been there, done that.

It’s hard to respond to our body’s cues when we are living in our heads (planning, analyzing, multitasking) or attending to external stimuli (kids, work, technology...oh my). This cognitive mode, while necessary, can disconnect us from the immediate, sensory experience of being present. Therefore, taking time to arrive in our body is a vital practice of shifting from doing to simply being.

This might look like noticing your feet on the ground, taking a slow breath before a meal, or feeling the temperature of the air on your skin. These simple practices can start to signal safety to the body, activating the parasympathetic "rest and digest" branch of our nervous system, allowing for more accurate sensing and improved digestive capacity (Porges, 2011). A good example of this is having your appetite emerge once you finally have time to rest on the couch in the evening.

What I love about this practice is that it's experiential. It happens in real time, in your unique body. No one knows the blueprint of your body and sensations as well as you do. There is no “getting it wrong” or “being bad at embodiment”, just information in the here-and-now to consider. 

Take that rushed lunch example I shared and consider an alternate version. What would it be like to push the screens away, feel your seat in your chair, and take a deep breath – truly arriving – before starting your meal? What would that shift? Perhaps, the ability to taste and enjoy your food with greater capacity or feel emerging fullness a bit sooner than when distracted. 

What arriving can look like in nutrition counseling sessions:

• Grounding at session start: Taking time to notice your feet on the floor, breath rhythm, and body settling into the chair to support nervous system regulation and presence

• Pre-meal pause: Creating space for 3-breaths before eating together to facilitate the shift from cognitive to embodied awareness

• Sensory anchoring during activation: Inviting awareness of temperature, texture, and physical surroundings when feeling too overwhelmed or anxious when talking about food or body.

When we practice arriving consistently, we create the foundation for deeper connection and trust with our bodies, leading us to foundation #2.

2. Fostering Body Connection and Trust

Connecting to our body can be a lot like connecting with other people. Have you ever wanted to make more friends, but you’ve struggled to follow through on plans? Developing these connections requires us to show up, and the same goes for befriending our bodies. Once we arrive and ground into our bodies, we can develop a deeper connection. This can involve the full practice of tuning in, interpreting what we sense, and responding with care.

This foundation rests on three interrelated capacities noted by researchers in the embodiment field:

Attunement to inner states: Developing interoceptive awareness — the ability to notice subtle cues like hunger, fullness, energy shifts, and emotional states. Research shows this measurable physiological skill supports emotional regulation, decision-making, and overall well-being (Craig, 2002; Mehling et al., 2012; Tylka & Wood-Barcalow, 2015).

Agency and trust: Learning to honor what you notice. This means not just recognizing hunger, but trusting it enough to eat. Or, not just feeling fatigue, but permitting yourself to rest. These sensations are powerful communicators, not something your brain made up. This means experiencing your body as competent and capable — trusting what it can do and how it guides you. (Piran, 2016; Tylka & Wood-Barcalow, 2015).

Attuned self-care: Responding to your body's needs with care and consistency. This is where awareness becomes action: eating when hungry, resting when tired, moving in ways that feel nourishing, choosing foods that support how you want to feel. The cool thing is that the more you engage in this attuned self-care, the more connected you become.

Many of us have learned to override these body cues. We push through hunger, ignore fatigue, suppress cravings. Diet culture teaches us not only that our bodies can't be trusted, but to view them from the outside — as objects to control, projects to perfect, problems to fix. Embodiment asks us to shift from objectification to inhabitation, aka to experience our bodies as lived-in rather than observed.

Connection develops through both cognitive understanding and practical, lived-in application. We can learn about interoception and body trust conceptually, and we can practice experiencing it. This looks like eating regularly and noticing how it affects energy, checking in with sensations and actually responding to them, or reflecting on how different choices feel in the body over time.

Unlike arriving, which is immediate and present-focused, connection and trust build gradually. This is the ongoing relationship with the body, strengthened through repeated attention, care, follow-through and compassion.

What fostering connection and trust looks like in nutrition counseling sessions:

• Supporting curiosity over judgment: Framing body experiences as experiments and opportunities for noticing rather than evaluating success or failure (e.g., "What happens when you eat breakfast within an hour of waking versus waiting until noon?")

• Validating body signals: Acknowledging what the body is communicating as meaningful information worth exploring, whether it's hunger, fatigue, cravings, or discomfort (e.g., "That afternoon fatigue is your body telling you something important about timing, food choices, or rest")

• Celebrating responsiveness: Naming and affirming moments that honor your body's signals to reinforce the connection between noticing and responding (e.g., "You felt tired and chose to rest instead of pushing through—that's attuned self-care")

• Addressing disconnection with compassion: Normalizing the difficulty of noticing or trusting body cues as an understandable result of many things: diet culture, pacing of modern society, trauma, neurodivergence, eating disorders, and chronic Illness, to name a few. Disconnection is a very important cue in its own right. It lets us know that more needs to be explored - whether in nutrition counseling, therapy, or at the doctor's office.

Building body connection and trust is gradual and often, nonlinear work. However, each moment of awareness and each decision to honor the body's cues strengthens this relationship over time. This is important because when connection and trust are present, food choices become less driven by rules and "shoulds" and more influenced by the body. This helps eating feel more aligned and, therefore, sustainable.

What's Ahead

These two practices — arriving and connecting — form the experiential heart of Embodied Nutrition. They're what clients do and feel as they develop a relationship with their bodies. Arriving creates the conditions for connection and trust to emerge. Connection and trust deepen when practiced consistently and compassionately.

In Part 2b, we'll explore the two remaining foundations: understanding our body as an integrated system and recognizing the larger contexts that shape our nourishment. These frameworks help us make sense of what we experience and meet ourselves with compassion when embodiment feels difficult.

Then, in the months ahead, I'll share deeper explorations of each foundation — from grounding practices that support digestion, to the science of interoceptive awareness and rebuilding body trust, to how stress and hormones shape eating, to the systemic factors that influence nourishment.

For now, I'll leave you with this: What's one small thing you are noticing in your body right now?

References

Craig, A. D. (2002). How do you feel? Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the body. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3(8), 655–666.

Mehling, W. E., et al. (2012). Body awareness: A phenomenological inquiry into the common ground of mind-body therapies. Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine, 7(1), 6.

Piran, N. (2016). Embodied possibilities and disruptions: The emergence of the Experience of Embodiment construct from qualitative studies with girls and women. Body Image, 18, 43-60.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation.

Tylka, T. L., & Wood-Barcalow, N. L. (2015). What is and what is not positive body image? Conceptual foundations and construct definition. Body Image, 14, 118-129.