The Conscious Eating Community
Developing empowered relationships to eating and emotion through mindfulness, recipes, and community
Conscious Eating Community
What if you could...
manage strong emotions and craving states more easily
enjoy a peaceful and joyful relationship with food
feel empowered when it comes to your eating choices
love yourself and your body more
and show up more fully to life?
We're Katie and Annette, your support system for a more peaceful relationship to your food, body, and emotions.
When we met, we'd both lost a bunch of weight with a highly structured eating program and developed fantastic habits with food and healthy eating. For the first time in our adult lives, we were feeling in control of our eating and maintaining our goal weight using a structured eating plan. Fears of uncontrolled eating and weight gain no longer ruled our lives.
But we still didn't feel empowered with our eating choices. We didn't like the idea that we were incapable of learning to trust our own intuition, or that we couldn't rely on our own authority when flexibility with our food plans felt sane or needed. We still felt a lot of judgement and experienced negative self talk whenever we experimented with our food plans and boundaries.
We both reached a point where we weren’t interested in just maintenance, we wanted mastery over our relationships with food and eating.
Within the constraints of our food plans, we began to support each other in exploring our boundaries, practicing the tools of mindfulness, and accessing our body's wisdom. We’ve taken a deep look at our relationships to food, eating, and weight, and along the way we've come to find greater flexibility and a feeling of empowerment with our food choices.
We want to share with you HOW we took our relationships with food to the next level. So, we created the Conscious Eating Community.
What Is Conscious Eating?
Conscious Eating is a community platform, with the goal of bringing together people with shared aspirations of wanting to feel more empowered with their food choices, and supporting them in mastering that together.
Through engaging in this rich, rewarding, and transformative work together, our goal is to help our members move away from suffering and toward living their most authentic, satisfying, and joyful lives in service to the world and others.
Our method involves 3 integrated and fundamental components, each of which is ongoing and develops gradually through weekly habits of engagement within the community. These 3 essential ingredients for deep transformation are healthy habits, mindfulness, and community.
3 Essential Components
We built the community around the 3 major factors that we found most supported us in transforming our relationships to food, eating, body, cravings, thoughts, and difficult emotions.
Healthy Habits
A healthy relationship with food includes learning to cook and eat meals that will nourish your body while bringing joy and satisfaction. Healthy habits for well being and self care are also an essential ingredient in becoming a Conscious Eater, because our mental and emotional landscape is directly linked with our eating behaviors.
Community
We can't master something as complex as our eating and relationship to food without the support and inspiration of others. Witnessing others moving along a similar path inspires us, reminds us of our intentions and helps us to keep coming back, validates our struggles, sparks new insights, provides a mirror for feedback and self-awareness, and allows for abstract tools and practices to come to life in other people’s experience so that we can apply them in our own lives.
Through regular interaction with other community members with the same aspirations as you, you'll be inspired and lifted up by others who are implementing mindfulness tools in creative ways, cooking healthy and delicious food, and who understand whatever struggle you might be facing. You'll benefit beyond measure by surrounding yourself with others who are ready to support you through it just as much as they are ready to celebrate your journey with you.
Mindfulness
If you are like us, you may have already experienced the benefit of healthy eating habits and community support from other programs. For us, coming from a structured eating program, our food prep habits had never been healthier and we've never felt more supported or connected. But there was still something missing for us, which we later discovered were the practices of mindfulness. Mindfulness gives us tools for empowerment and self-awareness, moving through challenges with courage and compassion, and allow us to discover what is actually true for us.
We've selected Eight Core Conscious Eating Practices that we've found to be the most powerful on our own paths. After working through our 8-day Foundations Course to become familiar with these core practices, you'll get a new guided audio practice every Monday in the community to help you deepen and apply these core techniques. By posting and reading each other's practice reports, you'll learn interesting ways to put them into practice, and receive weekly, individualized coaching from Annette to take your mindfulness practice further.
What Our Members Get:
A New Mindfulness Practice Each Week
Every Monday Annette shares a new mindfulness practice, which gives you a new tool each week for deepening and applying our Eight Core Conscious Eating Practices and bringing greater awareness to your eating throughout the day.
Weekly Food Prep Challenges
Every weekend, join in Katie’s fun and easy food prep challenge to bolster your habits and routines around meal planning & grocery shopping, reduce your reliance on recipes by learning to prepare simple, healthy ingredients in delicious ways, and nourish your body while delighting your taste buds.
Live Mindfulness Coaching
Every week Annette offers live coaching to support community members with their mindfulness practice.
Meal Inspiration & Recipes
Each week Katie features a plant-based ingredient with a wide variety of simple, delicious, and creative ways to prepare it. Come away with inspiration for new and tasty meals, learn new cooking techniques, and connect with the community by sharing recipes and your favorite way to prepare the ingredient of the week!
Weekly Community Check-In Calls
These weekly zoom calls are simply for having more face-to-face connection time with each other. This call has no formal structure, and will not be recorded. It's truly just an open-ended time to hang out and talk about anything, whether it's celebrations, struggles, or questions. We like to think of it as our community getting together to share Sunday morning coffee and a nice chat.
Exclusive Workshops & Courses
Each month we curate fantastic workshops, events, and courses connected to a monthly theme which our community explores together. We usually run about 4 workshops/month, usually on Saturday mornings. Examples of past workshops include Transforming Habit Energy, Meditate & Create, 5Rhythms Movement, Healing Food Relationships Through the Power of Story, Freedom from the Power of Cravings, The 6 Tastes of Ayurveda: Maximizing Meal Satisfaction, Seasonal Eating to Benefit Health, Internal Family Systems (Parts Work) and so much more!
Daily Morning Meditation Calls
Join Annette every morning at 7:00 PST to start your day with clarity and intention. These sessions are 15 minutes: a 10 minute guided meditation based on the week's mindfulness practice and a 5 minute prompt for developing clarity about your mindset for the day.
Access to Special Interest Groups
We have a number of special groups that form based on member interest, some of which are member-led. These groups are optional, fun ways to connect with other members and engage more deeply in the community. Most groups run special (often recurring) events. Examples of past and current groups are Conscious Creatives, Mindfulness & Meditation Nerds, Mindful Movement Group, and Conscious Eating Book Club.
A Platform Designed for Community & Human Connection
Meet The Hosts
Katie and Annette met in 2019 through a program for weight loss and managing food addiction. Both of them naturally fell into leadership roles within that community, Katie with her recipe blog and Annette with her youtube channel bringing mindful eating techniques to self described food addicts. As they continued transforming their own relationships with food and weight, they noticed that they were attracting similar kinds of people to their platforms; folks who want to heal relationships to food, eating, and weight, and have a deep desire for joy, inner stability, and freedom. In early 2020 they realized they needed to create something magical together. They teamed up to create the Conscious Eating Community, so that they could share valuable tools for growth and empowerment and harness the power of a community of people seeking to master the same thing. They make a kick-ass team and balance each other wonderfully.
Annette James
Mindfulness Coach
Annette is a certified mindfulness coach with Unified Mindfulness, a secular and science-backed system of mindfulness techniques. In the Conscious Eating Community, Annette specializes in bringing a warm, open presence to support you in the self exploration that is your mindfulness practice, especially as it relates to the inner dramas of eating and food. She promotes self-love and body positivity.
Katie Gates
Recipe Guru & Food Blogger
Katie is known for her popular recipe blog Katie's Bright Kitchen. In the Conscious Eating Community, Katie specializes in joyful recipes, food prep, wellness practices, and healthy habits. Katie also dabbles lightly in meditation instruction (with a slightly different flavor and style than Annette's) and leads weekly circles in the Conscious Creatives group, a special interest group for the artistically inclined members in the community.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Is this an eating program?
No, this is a community platform, where members support each other in up-leveling their eating and relationship with food, body, and emotions using whatever methods and resources they feel drawn to.
Q: What are the eating rules in Conscious Eating Community?
We believe that YOU are the best expert on what works for you and we do not encourage or discourage any particular ways of eating. Our focus is on supporting you as you explore your relationship with food and eating, and on helping you tap into your own wisdom to discover what foods and ways of eating best serve YOU.
Q: What's the time commitment needed to benefit from this community?
Our typical offerings are designed to be pretty quick but powerful additions to your week (5-20 minutes per day). Longer duration activities include an optional weekly coaching call and any special workshops and events we host. We always post the live replays of these events for folks who can't make it live.
Q: Is this a BLE community?
No, but we would describe it as BLE-friendly. We both came out of BLE and so we are uniquely qualified to support others who are working with the tools and messaging of that community. However, we've both moved away from the program and are maintaining a healthy weight and peaceful relationship with food by practicing many of the mindfulness tools that we share here and by surrounding ourselves with the support of others. You will find many current and former BLEers in here, many of whom share the experience of finding BLE helpful for a time but feeling like something was missing. We think that what draws BLEers to our community (besides Katie's recipe blog) is the experience of loving the structure and healthy habits of bright lines but wanting to feel empowered with food choices, rather than feeling trapped in the idea of being "broken" or unable to learn to trust our own eating decisions.
Member Testimonials
"I'm amazed at the amount of self-discovery that seems to be unfolding after just one week in this community. Katie, Annette and this community are the best gift I could give myself for the coming year." - Liz
"What a mind blowing first week this has been. Can't believe my good luck (and divine intervention!) to have found this community. Katie and Annette, your creation here is obviously one of love, talent, wisdom/experience, and devotion to being of service. Not to mention the great relief I'm feeling to not have the BLE "rules" to rebel against and to experience the non ego, open hearted way you both show up." - Deb
"Tonight for the first time I wrote down what I will cook for my family and eat for myself completely painlessly... joyfully really. I was excited about the cooking I would do. I think that the attitude in this community of trusting myself rather than monitoring my motives like I have done in BLE has started to sink in to my being. Thank you. These words do not do justice to the big step this feels like. I have so much respect for everyone and grateful to be benefiting from your journeys!" - Eve
"I love the underpinnings of this group, that we have cultivating community, encouragement for daily mindfulness practices, and leanings towards nourishing healthy food. All foundations for a thriving life." - Jayne
"Since joining this community about 2 weeks ago I have learned so much. Thanks for everything." - Pat
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