Dessert First: Issue #3

It's always okay to enjoy dessert first. Sweet things make excellent beginnings.

Then we’ll settle into the Main Dish and explore a question that keeps coming up in different forms. Last issue, it showed up around GLP-1s. This week, it shows up around veganism.

🍰 Sweet Moment(s)

The Seahawks won the Super Bowl! 🏈 🎉

There’s something so satisfying about a win like that. Not because it proves anything or fixes anything, but because it’s shared.

I love the collective excitement. The rituals. The lightness of a game that doesn’t need to mean anything more than it does.

🍽 The Main Course:  Values, Not Rules

Every so often, someone will ask me a version of this question:
How can you do "that" and still be an intuitive eater?

"That” might be supporting GLP-1s. Or being vegan. Or caring about health but not dieting. Or making intentional choices about what you do or don't eat.

It’s a familiar tension: the idea that intuitive eating has to live in an either/or world, where caring about one thing somehow cancels out another. Where intuitive eating is a free-for-all, and anything intentional is mistaken for restriction. 

That’s never been how intuitive eating has felt to me.

Intuitive eating isn’t about abandoning values; it’s about letting go of control that’s driven by fear, punishment, or body manipulation. It's about rebuilding trust with your body, learning to listen instead of override, and to respond instead of force.

There’s a big difference between rules that come from trying to fix yourself and choices that come from knowing yourself.

Being vegan fits that distinction for me. It’s about alignment. When what I eat lines up with what matters to me...emotionally, energetically, ethically...my body doesn’t experience that as deprivation. 

It experiences it as coherence. Things settle.

For some people, veganism does feel restrictive, and that matters. The same choice can feel spacious to one person but constricting to another.

What I keep noticing is that when our choices pull us away from ourselves, there’s usually a cost. 

Sometimes that cost shows up physically. Sometimes it shows up mentally, or spiritually. Sometimes it’s just a low-grade sense of friction you can’t quite name.

Intuitive eating makes room for listening to all of it. It's not just about the body’s cues. It's also about the quieter signals: what feels congruent, and what doesn’t.

🧂 Flavor Boost: Regrets

I heard something recently that stuck with me:

Sometimes it’s hard to name our values directly. But we can often find them on the other side of regret.

If you regret doing something, it’s worth getting curious about why. Often, that regret is bumping up against a value you hold dear. Turn the coin over, and there it is.

Not something to fix or get rid of. Just something to notice. 🪞

Until next time - more dogs, less dogma. Always.

Carol