Welcome to my quick reference guide to helping you get started on your journey to intuitive eating!

Chances are, if you've followed my work for a while - or even if you've just found me - you're a yogi, earth goddess, pachamama, natural health buff, or hippie who also happens to be smart and keen to learn more about all things non-diet.

I'm personally a lover of Mother Nature, and I think you might be too. I believe that the patterns and cycles found in nature can teach us much about food, connection and culture. They have the power to help us not only be healthier, but also to understand and heal our relationship to food and our bodies. The relationship that has been fractured by diet culture.

​There are many cyclical patterns in nature and each has its place in helping us live full, rich, and healthy lives. The continual shifting of the four seasons is a well-known natural pattern, as is the alternation of day and night, and the lunar cycles.

This intuitive eating series started in 2017 and is based on the 12 to 13 lunar cycles per year, which roughly tie in with the four seasons. It's my personal take on the original 10 Intuitive Eating principles as first defined by Elyse Resch and Evelyn Tribole in their revolutionary book, Intuitive Eating.

This is still a work in progress but there's plenty of material here to start experimenting with as you reclaim your agency from diet culture and start the work of healing your relationship with food and your body.

The Intuitive Eating Principles:

1. Shallow Water Moon - Hitting Diet Rock Bottom
2. Blood Moon - Slaying the Diet Mentality
3. Moon of Underground Treasure - Shifting Your Beliefs About Food, Weight and Your Body
4. Moon of Long Nights - Embracing Hunger & Fullness Cues
5. ​Wolf Moon - Discovering Satisfaction
6. ​Seed Moon - Moving From Body Shame to Body Respect

Visit them in order or simply start on the area you think you most need help with. As I mentioned this is a work in progress and there are still a few more lunar cycles to come! If you would like more resources to continue on your intuitive eating journey, click here.

Good luck and travel boldly!

​Casey x

Dinner out with the family, and we are in the same neighbourhood as our favourite Thai restaurant. I enjoy a Jungle curry; dotted with sliced red chillis and entire bunches of green peppercorn rows and without the merciful cooling effect of coconut milk, its one of the hottest items on the menu.

That night as we drive home, my husband cops an earful about his driving. I have a cold shower but still feel hot and sweaty afterwards. I'm more impatient with my kids as I put them to bed. I'm unsettled and agitated but eventually fall asleep.

I dream of billowing red clouds in the distance. Looking around I notice I'm standing in the doorway of my house, and that the crimson clouds are emanating from nearby houses which are being engulfed by a bushfire. I look behind me and realise that my home, too is on fire. I am trapped with my husband and children and think "this is the end" until a bunch of firefighters kick the door down.

That's what you get when you load a pitta meal onto a pitta person! According to Ayurveda, my constitution is predominantly pitta, or hot: my mind is sharp (as can be my tongue), my build is medium, I put on muscle quite easily, and when threatened my temper can flare. Ayurveda would say that my heat-increasing indulgences increased the natural heat in my pitta constitution and lead to hot conditions “erupting” in my body and emotions. 

Even whilst knowing that my pitta body and mind respond in a certain way when I eat spicy food, I will continue to eat spicy food for the rest of my life as I absolutely love it. 

It's mid-April in Southeast Queensland, Australia and I'm on a brisk neighbourhood walk with my 3-month old baby strapped to my chest. Autumn has arrived and I'm enjoying her cool, dry winds blowing away the last bites of summer heat. The sky looks to be at its most crisp and brilliant blue, and as if my psyche is mirroring that azure expanse I'm experiencing more clarity of vision, both pragmatically as well as spiritually.

I love autumn: the way the Eucalypts never shed their leaves but somehow still change with the seasons. In Summer they surrender their volatile oils to the scorching sun and droop in reverence of Sol's firey power. Today their leaves rustle joyfully as a cool breeze glides between them, that blue bowl a striking backdrop. The vata (wind) element as described in the ancient system of Ayurveda is undoubtedly the primary seasonal force at play.

The unabashed beauty of Mother Nature is quickly shut down like an airtight lock in a spacecraft as I interrupt my walk to dash into a supermarket. I'm here to grab a few ingredients I'm missing for some cookies I want to bake. Since the air-conditioning is cranked at an uncomfortable full throttle and baby is starting to squirm in reaction, I make the diversion as quick as possible.

At the checkout I notice the usual purveyors of diet culture: several women's "health" magazines with impossibly white, thin, able-bodied, rich, heteronormative women on the covers, shouting their dietary dogma at me. In the interests of social experimentation I resist the urge to cover up each of the horrendous women's magazines with copies of Home & Garden, flip open a popular rag, and peruse:

11 Things You Can Do In 5 Minutes Or Less To Help You Lose Weight
5 Surprising Ways With Edible Flowers
12 Foods You'd Never Guess Are Actually Vegan
9 Keto-Friendly Snacks That Will Actually Keep You Full
Master Trainer So-and-So Shares Her Day On a Plate (turns out she only eats protein and raw vegetables, with pumpkin "as a treat")
The Best Way To Deal With Food Pushers (i.e. how to stay on your diet and say no to cake when "pushy" family members offer you their home-baked goods.)

This is sad. It is depressing. And it is bullshit. It's autumn, it's getting cooler, and the last thing I feel like eating are edible flowers. The Ayurvedic cookbook I was flipping through earlier today had some much more appetising options.

It's times like these I'm so fucking glad I found intuitive eating, a flexible, instinctual relationship to food that transcends beliefs and systems, drawing directly on embodied experience. ​

Curiously, ancient systems like Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) seem a lot more accommodating to the seasonal fluctuations in food cravings that I experience. At least they don't suggest that in autumn I should eat raw salads decorated with edible flowers.

But does this mean I should cast aside my intuitive eating principles and rest easy in the comfort of eating according to my dosha (Ayurveda), or whether I'm ruled by the metal or the wood element (TCM)?

Well, not exactly. 
​

Having a baby is one of the most challenging things you’ll ever do.

Going through pregnancy, labour and delivery demands a lot from a woman - physically, mentally,  emotionally, and spiritually.

From the time we see that double line on the pregnancy test, many women spend hundreds of hours finding the right antenatal care providers. We read all the books, ask all the questions, and buy or borrow all the things we think a newborn baby needs

By the way, they mainly just need you, your boobs if you're breastfeeding / bottle if not, and your body warmth.

What we often fail to prepare ourselves for is what comes after the baby is born:

the months (and in some cases years) we spend recovering from this massive life event.

Our recovery from childbirth. The all important but under-acknowledged postpartum. And the desperate need we have, both as individuals and as a society, to nourish the mother during this time more than any other.