Hi, I’m Rachel.
I love hungers.
I think it’s awesome that we don’t have to figure out what’s right for us so much as we have to listen, with a bit of discernment, for what does and doesn’t feed us.
I imagine you found your way here because you’re hungry.
Maybe you want more ease with food.
Maybe you want to feel more at home in your skin.
Maybe you’re simply hungry to be less tripped up by diet culture.
Regardless of what you’re hungry for, if you’re struggling to hear your hungers or to heed their call, you’re in the right place. I have dedicated nearly two decades of my life to supporting humans on this very journey.
While today I think hungers are rad, I didn’t always think that.
Like so many, I spent a long time uneasy with my hungers. I was ashamed of them. I feared that I wanted too much. I was certain that if I felt my hungers they would be so big they would swallow me whole. I tried to override them. I tried to mute them. I tried to control them.
In the end, the war with my hungers controlled me.
And the saddest part is that all along my hungers were my greatest ally and source of guidance.
The details of my story are not uncommon…
I didn’t invent the belief that my hungers were not to be trusted. No, we’re sold this from an early age. We’re told in a million different ways that safety, love, success, and power are the reward for conquering the big, bad hunger wolf. And that makes for good business. Trillions of dollars of industry thrive on you and me not trusting our hungers. The end result for too many of us is countless rides on the diet-binge roller coaster, years of attempting to satisfy ourselves with things we don’t actually want, and a palpable unrest.
When I was told by a doctor at 20 that I had an eating disorder I was shocked. In my mind, smart feminists (which I considered myself to be) didn’t get eating disorders. From that day forward I dedicated myself to understanding how it was that I got so lost. In the process of discovering that trusting my food hungers was the way forward, I came to see that I had to trust all of my hungers. Being selective was not an option.
This epiphany, coupled with a profound awakening to the Health at Every Size paradigm, Intuitive Eating, and the ways in which The Patriarchy was disempowering and distracting women through unrealistic and unhealthy ideals resulted in, well, you being here, reading this right now.
In the span of time since I sat in that doctor’s office, I recovered, served as the Eating Disorder Prevention and Treatment health educator for a private college, earned my Master’s degree in Holistic Health Education, and wrote my thesis on how we can feed ourselves (at the table and away) with ease, and have coached and counseled other’s toward this freedom for nearly two decades.
My interest these days is less on raging against diet culture (though I still do) and more on finding quiet refuge from the noise of the world so that we can hear ourselves, reset our nervous systems, and find human connection.
The result is the same, I hope: people more able to heed the call of their wise hungers and live well-fed lives.
Currently, there are two ways I’m available to serve you: Sift (healing writing groups) and Replenish (in-person restorative retreats). I only ever want to bring you the work that is most alive. Through Sift and Replenish I’m grateful to do just that.
Credentials
I bring to my practice certification in Wild Writing™, Intuitive Eating Counseling, and certification in Life Coaching from The Coaches Training Institute and a Masters in Holistic Health Education from John F. Kennedy University. More than these résumé bullet points though, I bring exceptional warmth, intuition, candor, and agility to my clients.
Personal Bits
These days you can find me in the San Francisco Bay Area where I live with my husband and our daughter.
When motherhood allows for enough sleep, I love doing the New York Times crossword puzzle, working in my vegetable garden, and hitting thrift stores nearby. Perhaps it sounds like I’m practicing for retirement but our lives should be made of what brings us joy and these activities, combined with the people I get to share them with, do that for me entirely.