Not all professional kitchens are the same. Your experiences will be different than mine AND you’ll continue learning and discovering new things while you are working in the culinary industry. These are six things that I wish I would’ve understood better before entering the culinary field. Note: These definitely wouldn’t have stopped me from becoming a Chef. I’m so glad that I took the career path that I did. I would’ve never realized how much I can help people become better cooks at home (and how rewarding it is) unless I had the experiences I had. In this video I also share four things to think about if you are considering going to culinary school. And we end the video with my top 5 most important things I’ve learned in professional kitchens that I use in my kitchen at home every day.

Health is super nuanced and individual. You get to choose how you want to prioritize health in your own life. In this video, we discuss how to create our own definition of health, how to listen to our internal cues to prioritize health, how to assess our access to health promoting behaviors, and how to navigate conversations about your unique health with others. When we look internally instead of turning externally to define and prioritize health, we can feel fully aligned and confident in our decisions. We can tune out diet culture and tune out the hundreds of people trying to sell us garbage 'for our health'. It is extremely important to remember that our individual health is unique and nuanced. So we absolutely do NOT need to base our own health decisions off of other people.

Health is incredibly unique and nuanced and the one size fits all approach truly fits NOBODY. What was meant to be a communication tool has been twisted and distorted to individual health advice. We’re sharing the context you need to know before reading another nutrition facts panel.

The food police is the collective of external messages we’ve heard throughout our lives that attempts to establish food rules around what we eat.

While we could simply say “our bodies are not like machines, stop comparing them” and be done, I’d like to offer a replacement comparison. Something that I hope draws attention to our uniqueness, resiliency, beauty, and imperfectness. Our bodies are like gardens.

Along our journey of Intuitive Eating, we also embark on a journey to find body acceptance. Intuitive Eating Coach Jacque and Chef Nakia discuss how both external messages and internal messages have an impact on our body image. Discover some tools to employ to help you along this journey of body acceptance and intuitive eating.

Both Intuitive Eating Principles, Honor Your Hunger and Feel Your Fullness, involve interoceptive awareness to understand our bodies’ hunger and fullness cues. Both of these principles urges us to check in with our bodies and make our food decisions based on our internal feelings, not external diet culture messaging.

RD Anna Gustafson and Chef Nakia discuss how diet culture creeps onto our food packaging. We also discuss ingredient fear and dispelling this fear around ‘don’t eat it if you can’t pronounce it’.

Explore how Intuitive Eating can benefit your children. Chef Nakia interviews RD Samantha MPH to discover how children can step into autonomy around food and reject diet mentality from the beginning.

Nobody is meant to be perfect and the pursuit of perfection is a fool’s game. Giving up the pursuit of perfection can be liberating and calming and scary and challenging and rewarding and a whole mix of emotions. Intuitive Eating is anti-diet and anti-perfection.

Chef Nakia interviews Chelsea Chandler MPH, RD, CIEC to learn about making peace with food. We explore what permission to find peace looks like in our food journey. We also talk about a few sneaky phrases that diet culture uses to undermine our food decisions. And we dive into the Social Determinants of Health and discover how complex and personal each person's health is.

Whether we’re spending time at an ocean beach close to home, a mountain ‘beach’ a short drive away, or taking a full oceanfront vacation - we want to be comfortable and enjoy our time. And while it’s ok if we still feel self-conscious wearing less layers than normal, we don’t want to be fixated on it and miss out on the joyful moments. If we’re going to worry about anything while at the beach, we should worry about reapplying sunscreen and getting rid of all of the sand post beach day, not our body size.