Body Image and Weight Concerns

Nutrition Support in Gainesville

When Your Body Feels Like a Constant Project

You may have spent days, months, or years trying to change the size and shape of your body, changing how you eat so many times you've lost count. Starting over on Mondays. Joining new workout programs.

Meanwhile, you're unhappy with your size and shape. It's impacting your life, taking up an enormous amount of energy — and no matter what you do, it's not working.

Your body feels like a constant project that you just don't yet have the right blueprint for.

Does This Sound Like You?

• Frequently checking or avoiding your reflection

• Comparing your body with other people's

• Avoiding being photographed for fear of how you'll look

• Afraid of gaining weight

• Choosing clothes primarily to hide or change how your body appears

• Putting off activities or social situations until your body changes

• Believing that on some level your weight is a measure of your self-worth

In our culture, these concerns are very real. Unfortunately, the advice offered often centers on restriction and tighter control — which can make the struggle worse.

It's not just about a number on the scale. It's about how much of your life is organized around that number.

A Different Way to Manage Eating and Weight

We hear that controlling weight is simple — adjust your food and exercise, and you can be the weight you want to be. The solutions offered — restricting, counting calories or points, cutting out foods, and setting rigid food rules — are all external ways to control eating.

We started our careers helping people to eat this way. Over time, we saw that restriction often wasn’t working and was contributing to problems such as:

• Obsessive thoughts about food

• Intense cravings

• Deprivation-driven eating

• Even eating disorders and disordered eating

Our work helps you move from eating governed by outside rules toward eating guided by your body's signals, your nutritional needs, and the realities of your life. Hunger, fullness, satisfaction, and pleasure become useful information, alongside nutrition knowledge.

You don't have to trust those signals or be ready for intuitive eating to begin. You may want a meal plan or other structure while building that connection. We start where you are and help you develop a flexible, individualized way to manage eating and weight.

And at the same time, we help weight stop dominating your life.

When You Feel Fat

You may believe the problem is your body — that you’re too fat, not healthy enough, or not toned enough. The solution, we’re told, is to lose weight, tighten up, eat cleaner. And then, finally, we’ll feel happy and content.

If weight loss were the ticket to happiness, we’d get happier with every pound shed. Instead, feeling good remains something waiting for you at the goal weight. And even when you get there, you may find yourself lowering the goal or finding something else about your body to change. The food worry and body dissatisfaction can continue.

Body Image Work Matters

When you feel fat or too big, that feeling isn’t simply a reflection of the number on the scale. How you perceive and experience your body also shapes how you feel in it.

That perception, called your body image, can actually shift even when the body itself has not changed. That suggests that discomfort can change even if you’re not at your goal weight. You don’t have to wait to start feeling better.

We help you work through the distress you feel about your body, so your sense of well-being isn’t so tied to a number on the scale or the shape of your body.

Finding a Way Forward

If you want to get back the time, energy, and attention this focus has taken from the rest of your life — we can help. Dr. Karin Kratina, RDN, LDN and Dr. Hannah Allen, RDN, LDN both specialize in body image and weight management, and provide specialized outpatient nutrition therapy.

Our work in Gainesville’s eating disorders treatment community spans more than three decades. When additional support would be helpful, we can connect you with skilled therapists, physicians, and other providers.