let's transform your relationship with food from the bottom up
SOMATIC NUTRITION THERAPIST & INTUITIVE EATING COUNSELLOR
- Overwhelmed (e.g. trouble letting go, relaxing, constant worrying about what's next, general anxiety)
- Frustrated, antsy, on edge, irritable
- Chronic pain, autoimmune condition
- Difficulty sleeping (falling asleep, staying asleep, waking up rested)
- Low threshold for sensory stimulation
- Concentration and attention difficulties
- Immune and hormonal symptoms
- Skin and digestive issues
- Intensely empathetic; you are deeply impacted by the mood of others
Trauma can stem from acute stress due to a perceived threat to your life or a result of cumulative stress. This can really impact your ability to be in your body and comfortably access and honour cues such as appetite, hunger, fullness, and satisfaction.
These experiences — accidents, invasive medical procedures, sexual or physical assault, neglect, emotional abuse, war, natural disasters, loss, birth trauma, chronic illness, or the ongoing stress of fear and conflict — cause a threat response. Sometimes, the threat response doesn’t get to “complete” its full cycle and the residue stays in our system.
Even if you intellectually know the event is over, it can still feel like it’s happening.
Food insecurity can make it difficult to stop eating at comfortable fullness in the present.
Ongoing rejection and criticism of our eating habits and food choices can leave us dreading restaurant outings and scared to try new foods.
If we were soothed with food as children rather than having our feelings validated, we might find ourselves under-eating or constantly eating past fullness (emotional eating, binge eating) to cope with strong emotions.
And weight-based discrimination and anti-fat bias can have emotional, physiological, and psychological ramifications.
i have experience working with:
- Chronic dieting cycles/yo-yo dieting
- Disordered eating
- Body image concerns
- Orthorexia (a preoccupation with healthy eating)
- Binge eating disorder, sub-clinical binge eating
- Emotional eating
- Bulimia Nervosa (must be medically stable)
- Anorexia Nervosa (must be medically stable)
- Food avoidance
- Exercise hesitance
- Anxiety and eating concerns
- Sexual violence (e.g. incest, rape, objectification) and eating difficulties
- Developmental trauma and eating difficulties
- Neurodivergence and eating difficulties
- ARFID/Sensory hypersensitivity (heightened sensitivity to taste, smell, sight, sound, and touch.)
with 8+ years working with disordered eating and body image under my belt, i know nervous system dysregulation drives food and body obsession — and somatic work is part of the answer.
ABOUT sarah
This is where nervous system work comes in. How do you know if you have a dysregulated nervous system? Some hallmark symptoms include experiencing or feeling:
what is trauma or an adverse event? and how does it show up with food/body?
i understand where you are...because i've been there.
While the majority of my physical needs were met during my childhood, my parents — at no fault of their own — lacked the skills to attend to my emotional needs.
Like many others, I always felt I could push myself harder, and spent my teenaged years skipping from diet to diet with increasing intensity and dedication, always in search of The Secret.
To be honest, I didn't realize anything was wrong with me until I started to recover — and I know I'm not alone in that. I never "looked" ill to outsiders; my "healthy eating" and exercise habits were praised. This absence of concern only fuelled my disorder further.
While I love the anti-diet movement and Intuitive Eating, I know from first-hand experience how challenging it can be to actually stop dieting or engaging in disordered behaviours. For many reasons, it can also feel difficult to accept or even feel neutral about your natural body size.
In addition to my early life experiences, I'm a queer woman and sexual assault survivor who lives with chronic illness and chronic pain (endometriosis.) I've chosen to disclose these experiences because I have always appreciated working with practitioners who shared my lived experience and had an understanding of what I was going through.
I know first-hand how powerful and life-changing somatic work can be...and it's my pleasure and honour to bring this work to you.
I'm Sarah Berneche — NUTRITION THERAPIST, CERTIFIED INTUITIVE EATING COUNSELLOR, author of enjoy it all: improve your health and happiness with intuitive eating, AND SPEAKER.
i battled disordered eating and its various manifestations for 15 years. while i loved the concept of intuitive eating, i struggled to implement it. i never felt safe enough in my body to truly surrender. my experience, combined with the gaps i noticed in my practice, brought me to somatic, trauma-integrated work.
B.A.H. & M.A. in English Lit & Creative Writing
Registered Holistic Nutritionist + Certified Intuitive Eating Counsellor
Professionally mentored by Isabel Foxen Duke: October 2021 - May 2022
ACT for Beginners — March 2021
Digestive Disorders and Eating Disorders: A Complicated Mix (Marci Evans, CEDRD-S & Lauren Dear, RDN)
Nutrition Counselling for Eating Disorders (Marci Evans, CEDRD-S)
Body Image Training: The Missing Piece of Whole Body Healing (Marci Evans, CEDRD-S & Fiona Sutherland, APD)
Group and Individual Supervision: July 2017 — October 2018, The Kyla Fox Centre, Kyla Fox, MSW RSW
Group Supervision and Continuing Education: May 2019 — May 2021, EDRDPro
Non-Diet Counselling Skills - September 2020 (Tracy Brown, RD)
Individual Supervision: May 2020 —January 2023, Tracy Brown, RD
Advanced Trauma-Informed Counselling Skills / Somatic Counselling Skills — February 2021 (Tracy Brown, RD)
Somatic Experiencing® Student (Advanced I)
Guest of various podcasts, including Ditch the Diet, Devoured, Going Beyond the Food, and Chronically Healing
Presented for or facilitated workshops for various companies, including RioCan, Starbucks, eOne, Women's College Hospital, BMO, FlightCentre, MaRS, League, and more
Nominee, Trailblazer Award
CSNN Holistic Nutrition Awards
a few of my credentials and qualifications..
