Intuitive eating tips for clinical dietitians with limited time.
Short on Time? Intuitive Eating Tips
As clinical dietitians, we don’t get a lot of time with our clients.
Private practice RDs might have a full 45 minutes or an hour of time set aside to chat comfortably with each client. But clinical nutritionists are rarely so lucky. If we can get 15 minutes of undivided attention, that’s a great day.
Intuitive eating tips can be extremely helpful for clients struggling with their intake or following a therapeutic diet. But between doctors and nurses interrupting nutrition educations. Family and friends popping in at exactly the wrong time. Or patients who just don’t feel up to it. Having a conversation on something like intuitive eating can be tricky in a clinical setting.
This post has some helpful tips and resources on talking about intuitive eating quickly, especially when you’re short on time.
3 reasons to do nutrition education in a clinical setting
Deciding when to include intuitive eating into your nutrition educations often depends on 3 factors. Think about them as you’re deciding what information you’re going to share with your client. It’ll help you decide which of these 10 principles will be most helpful to focus on.
These 3 factors are:
- What kind of physical or medical conditions your client is in.
- How much time you have to talk to them.
- Any other information you need to provide.
There are 10 principles of intuitive eating. But this doesn’t mean you’re going to be able (or want) to talk to your clients about all of them. Let’s look at each principle so you know exactly where to start when you jump into intuitive eating with your clinical clients.
FACTOR 1. Your client’s physical or medical conditions
When it’s time to do any sort of nutrition counseling for clients admitted to a clinical, in-patient facility this should be one of the first things you review.
In acute care, we see people who are recovering from major surgery, are experiencing significant amounts of fatigue or have another physical or medical concern they’re managing. These folks may not have a great attention span. They might be in a significant amount of pain or they might simply be in a grumpy mood and ready to go home.
Understanding how much attention your client is able to give you, will go a long way to deciding which of the 10 principles of intuitive eating tips you’ll want to chat with them.
FACTOR 2. The amount of time you have with your client
There are a lot of reasons why the available time you have to spend with your client can be tight.
You might have a long list of other patients to see. Maybe you got the nutrition counseling referral from the doctor about 10 minutes before your client is supposed to be discharged. Or you could walk into your client’s room with all the time in the world. Only to have their daughter come in 5 minutes later wanting to talk to her mom alone.
Gauging how much time is available for you and your client can be a determining factor in how much and what kind of education you’re able to provide.
FACTOR 3. Other education needs your client requests
Balancing what you believe your client should learn with what they want to learn. This is one of the most important skills you can develop in nutrition counseling.
Just because you know your client needs a full diabetic diet education. Doesn’t mean they’re ready for that information. They might be asking for a way to manage their intake or feel more comfortable when they’re making food choices in the real world. These might be a wonderful way to focus the discussion more on intuitive eating than a therapeutic diet.
10 Principles of Intuitive Eating Tips
Now that we’ve looked at why to do this, let’s go over each of the principles of intuitive eating. At the end of this you’ll have useful ways to work each of them into clinical nutrition counseling session. Each of these principles can be discussed individually. You can also group them together based on what’s going on with your client, their interest level and how much time you have. One of the wonderful things about intuitive eating is you don’t have to take a lot of time working through each principle. Simply introducing the idea to a client can start them thinking about food in a new, healthy way.
Let’s take a look at each of the intuitive eating principles for tips on how clinical nutrition can fit in.
1. Reject the Diet Mentality
Many of our clients have been told for years that they need to follow a diet. Doctors tell clients they need to lose weight and instruct them on “bad foods” to avoid. Friends and family also follow suit with recommendation of fad diets and other ways to detox and cleanse their health and weight problems away.
In clinical nutrition, talking about rejecting the diet mentality can work well when you’ve got a client requesting a meal plan. Or even a written out set of instructions so they can “stick to their diet”. Presenting this principle while you talk about a recommended therapeutic diet, can make transitioning the conversation from a standardized meal plan to a healthy eating style a bit more seamless.
2. Honor your Hungry
It’s not uncommon for clients admitted into a clinical facility to talk to us about their struggles with overeating, binge eating or feelings of being out of control around food.
When it’s time to touch on your client’s relationship with food, honoring hunger is an excellent place to start. It can lead into conversations about recognizing physical cues which can be critical when discussing things like hypoglycemia or stroke symptoms.
Use the 22 page Intuitive Eating Workbook for interactive handouts and worksheets like these you can give your clients on each of the IE principles.
3. Make Peace With Food
This principle is a great way to talk to your clients about their relationship with food. As well as the relationship they’d like to have with food.
As you’re discussing guidelines that can help manage a medical condition, some clients may become worried about certain foods that are suggested or recommended. Giving clients a path away from any guilt and shame they may associate with certain foods can support a bigger conversation on how to manage a therapeutic diet.
4. Fight the Food Police
The food police can be internal or external conversations clients are having about all the bad foods they have to stay away from in order to consider themselves healthy.
In clinical nutrition, we often hear our clients reference these voices during assessments or nutrition education moments. Have this conversation about making healthy food choices during an education session on a therapeutic diet. Talking through this principle can be very effective in clients developing confidence with their food choices.
5. Satisfaction Factor
Looking for a key indicator of how well your client will follow a therapeutic diet? Start by listening for how they feel about the foods they believe are allowed and not allowed.
Chatting about how to choose healthy foods is a great start. But is even better while also giving clients space to sometimes pick foods that may fall outside of therapeutic diet guidelines. This can be a strong part of helping a client learn to cope with some big health changes.
6. Feel Your Fullness
Recognizing hunger and fullness cues is a key intuitive eating principle.
When we hear our clients expressing concerns about overeating. Talking a bit about the difference between feeling hunger and having a craving can be helpful. Spending a couple of minutes chatting about hunger cues can support your client as they begin figuring out how to successfully manage a therapeutic diet.
Download this and other intuitive eating handouts, including the full 22 page workbook HERE.
7. Be Kind to Yourself
Many times, our clients do very well managing their medical conditions through diet. Until they encounter a roadblock that they feel derails them. It’s easy for a client to hold onto the mindset that if they eat the “wrong” thing. They might as well admit that they’re failing. It’s in these moments that introducing this intuitive eating principle can be especially helpful.
Take a moment to encourage your client to be kind to themselves at these moments. This can go a long way to encouraging a client to stick to a therapeutic diet plan.
8. Respect Your Body
Sometimes in clinical nutrition weight status becomes crucial to managing health successfully. But many times it’s not important at all.
Your client might consider it to be the MOST important issue, which is where helping them to respect their body becomes important.
Understanding when a client’s weight is not the most important part of the conversation can help you support them in feeling comfortable in the body they have. This intuitive eating principle can help you have that conversation with your client, quickly and effectively.
Use the 22 page Intuitive Eating Workbook for interactive handouts and worksheets like these you can give your clients on each of the IE principles.
9. Joyful Movement
When a client decides something new is important, sometimes it triggers an overwhelming feeling to do it all the time. As though if they don’t do that thing enough, it won’t count for anything. Exercise is one of those things.
A client might suddenly declare they’ll be joining a gym and working out 2 hours a day, every day. All so they never have another heart attack. And while that’s admirable. If they haven’t worked out in the last 20 years, then it’s unlikely that this plan will be very successful.
Taking a moment to talk about all types of movement that can support their mental and physical well being. This can help clients find a happy medium where exercise no longer feels like an unsustainable chore.
10. Honor Your Health With Gentle Nutrition
For client who absolutely must manage their medical conditions with a therapeutic diet, this is likely not the best place to start. For other clients who can improve their overall health with a more general overview of a healthful diet, this intuitive eating principle is a great place to begin.
Intuitive Eating Tips
Although you can easily spend considerable time supporting your client in really building out each of these skill sets. It can be equally helpful to use intuitive eating like the ones in this post as supportive resources to help them succeed with other therapeutic needs.
And That’s It!
Get started with the handouts you saw here and some helpful prompts with the Intuitive Eating Guidebook. The Guidebook has a patient education handout AND a worksheet! You can use it to save time when you’re looking to add a bit of intuitive eating information to your nutrition education session.
CLICK HERE to view the entire 22 page workbook and all the other intuitive eating handouts you need.
Intuitive Eating Tips & Resources
Looking for some more resources on intuitive eating? Check out these amazing RDs on Instagram who specialize in intuitive eating with clients:
Want even more to help in clinical?
Check out The Nutrition Cheat Sheets Shop for all the nutrition education and clinical resources that will make your life easier.
