TRAUMA-INFORMED MINDFUL EATING

Food is often not just about the food.

Our relationships with nourishment are shaped by more than what we know about nutrition.

TIME is an educational framework exploring the many experiences that shape how we relate to food, our bodies, and nourishment—integrating nutrition science, neuroscience, trauma research, interoception, embodiment, mindfulness, and lived experience.

Intro to TIME
Stay Informed
Self-Paced Foundations

DOES ANY OF THIS SOUND FAMILIAR?

There can be a lot happening beneath the surface of eating. 

You think about what you ate, what you're going to eat, or what you “should” eat more than you'd like.

Food carries rules, expectations, emotions, memories, or meaning that can make eating feel complicated.

You've received plenty of information about nutrition, but knowing what to eat hasn't necessarily changed how eating feels.

You support people around food, health, or their bodies and find yourself wondering what else may be influencing the choices available to them.

You think about what you ate, what you're going to eat, or what you should or shouldn't eat — more than feels comfortable

Food feels loaded with meaning — moral, emotional, or social — in ways that exhaust you

You've tried approaches that focused on what to eat — and found that information alone didn't change how food feels

You work with clients navigating food and body challenges and want a framework that goes deeper

TIME invites us to become curious about what may be shaping these experiences.

What is Trauma-Informed Mindful Eating?

TIME is an educational framework for exploring how our relationships with nourishment are shaped.

What and how we eat doesn't develop in isolation. Our experiences with food and our bodies can be influenced by nutrition needs, stress, trauma, culture, family, food access, developmental experiences, dieting, healthcare experiences, interoception, body experiences, and the environments and systems in which we live.

TIME brings these influences into the conversation.

Rather than beginning with what someone should change, TIME invites curiosity about what is already there. Through four pillars—choice, agency, interoception, and awareness—and nine guiding principles, the framework creates opportunities to understand our experiences with nourishment differently and expand the choices available to us.

What would it feel like to just eat?

Eating can carry so much more than what is on the plate. Expectations, emotions, memories, rules, past experiences, questions about health, and an enormous amount of mental energy can all become part of the experience of nourishment.

What would it feel like if eating didn't have to carry quite so much?

TIME doesn't replace one set of rules with another. It invites us to understand more of what shapes our experiences with nourishment—creating space for greater awareness, connection, agency, and choice.

Not another right way to eat. More room to notice. More room to understand. More room to choose.

“Sometimes what looks like a struggle with food makes more sense when we understand everything that food has come to carry.”

— KRISTEN ZAPPONE, TIME CO-CREATOR

WHO IS TIME FOR

TIME is for anyone interested in approaching nourishment with more curiosity, awareness, and choice.

Some people come to TIME to explore their own experiences with food and their body. Others come because they support people navigating food, body image, health, or well-being.

And many come for both.

For personal exploration

You may find yourself thinking about food more than you'd like. Eating may feel complicated, confusing, or loaded with expectations about what, when, or how you “should” eat. You may have spent years receiving information about nutrition without ever having the opportunity to explore the experiences that shaped your relationship with nourishment.

TIME offers a different place to begin—not with another set of rules, but with curiosity about what is already there.

For professionals

TIME is relevant for dietitians, therapists, yoga professionals, coaches, educators, healthcare providers, and others who support people around food, the body, health, or well-being.

The framework offers a way to look beyond nutrition knowledge or behavior alone and consider the many influences that can shape someone's experience of nourishment—including stress, trauma, culture, food access, developmental experiences, interoception, body experiences, dieting, healthcare experiences, and the environments and systems in which we live.

TIME is designed to complement your existing education and scope of practice while expanding the lens through which you understand the people you support.

THE FRAMEWORK

9 Principles of Trauma-Informed Mindful Eating

Built on four pillars — choice, agency, interoception, and awareness — and organized into nine principles that guide the work from the inside out.

Enhance interoception
Partner with your body 

Establish safety with food
Explore the relationship with food

Allow food
Let go of restriction and keep food on the table 

Grieve loss and allow change
Healing from trauma and healing with food 

Honor your expertise and share power
You are the expert on you

Untangle feelings and food
Identify emotions and food responses 

Explore choice
Increase options

Build tolerance and endurance
Help the world get bigger so food fills less space 

Expand curiosity
Explore/experiment - TIME is not a prescription

YOUR LEARNING PATH

Not sure where to start?

Here's how to find your entry point.

  S T A R T  H E R E  

01

Get Involved

Read our webpage, sign up for our emails, and follow us on Instagram. Learn all you can about what TIME stands for.

Chat with us

O2

Intro Course

A 70minute introduction to TIME's core concepts. Perfect before the full program.

Access here

O3

Foundations Program

The full TIME experience in our Self-Paced Foundations. Learn on your own time, on your own schedule.

Access here

O4

Going further

Looking to work with TIME in a larger way? Reach out to us directly to talk about partnering, events, and how to stay connected!

Send us a note

A CFTE PROGRAM · TRAUMA-INFORMED MINDFUL EATING

Introduction to TIME

What if our relationships with nourishment make more sense when we understand what shaped them?

A 70-minute self-paced course with Registered Dietitian Kristen Zappone & Dr. Helena Benton
$49 · Self-Paced · 70 minutes

We’re surrounded by information about food.

What to eat. How much to eat. When to eat. How to recognize hunger and fullness. How to make choices that support our health.

And yet, knowing more about food doesn’t always make eating feel easier.

Our relationships with nourishment develop within the context of our lives. Stress, trauma, culture, family, access to food, body experiences, dieting, healthcare experiences, messages about health and weight, and the ways we’ve learned to notice—or disconnect from—our bodies can all shape how we experience food today.

Trauma-Informed Mindful Eating (TIME) offers a different place to begin.

Rather than starting with what someone is eating or what needs to change, TIME invites curiosity about what has shaped the relationship with nourishment in the first place.

Introduction to TIME is an invitation to experience that shift in perspective.

Buy Now
What you'll explore in 70 minutes:

Through teaching, reflection, and real-world examples, Kristen and Helena introduce some of the ideas at the heart of the TIME framework, including:

  • How our relationships with nourishment are shaped by more than nutrition knowledge
  • The role of interoception and our ability to notice and make sense of internal experiences
  • How stress, trauma, lived experience, and our environments can influence food and body experiences
  • A different way of understanding behaviors that may otherwise be viewed as problems to correct
  • The four pillars and nine principles that guide the TIME framework

You may leave with more questions than you started with.

That's intentional.

Our hope is that you leave looking at food, the body, and nourishment a little differently—and curious to keep exploring.

Who this is for:

Introduction to TIME is for anyone interested in exploring our relationships with nourishment from a different perspective.

You may be exploring your own experiences with food and your body. You may be a dietitian, therapist, yoga professional, coach, educator, healthcare provider, or other professional supporting others.

You don't need a particular background or professional credential.

Just curiosity.

Ready to see food and nourishment through a different lens?

Begin Introduction to TIME

Already know you want to go deeper?

NEW!

TIME Self-Paced Foundations 

Go beyond what we eat to explore what shapes our relationships with nourishment.

A comprehensive, self-paced training in the Trauma-Informed Mindful Eating framework

20-Hour Self-Paced Training · One Year of Access · $449

  • 22 CPEUs — Commission on Dietetic Registration (CDR)
  • 20 CE hours — Yoga Alliance
  • 20 CE hours — International Association of Yoga Therapists (IAYT)
  • Fulfills the annual continuing education requirement for TCTSY Facilitators

What changes when we stop looking at food behaviors simply as things to fix—and become curious about the experiences, needs, and circumstances that may be shaping them?

TIME Foundations takes you beyond the question of what someone eats and into a deeper exploration of the many experiences that shape our relationships with nourishment.

Across the training, you'll explore the intersections of nutrition science, neuroscience, trauma research, interoception, embodiment, mindfulness, and lived experience through the complete Trauma-Informed Mindful Eating framework.

TIME doesn't offer another set of rules for eating.

Instead, the framework creates space to understand what is already there—and to explore how greater awareness, choice, agency, and connection with the body may expand what becomes possible.

Register Now
FAQs

Whether you're exploring personally or professionally

TIME Foundations was created for both.

You may be here because you want to better understand your own relationship with nourishment.

Or you may be a dietitian, therapist, yoga professional, coach, educator, healthcare provider, or other professional looking for a more expansive way to understand the people you support.

You may be both.

The same framework invites personal exploration while offering professionals a new lens for understanding food and body experiences without reducing them to knowledge, motivation, compliance, or behavior change alone.

What you'll explore

Throughout TIME Foundations, you'll move through the four pillars—choice, agency, interoception, and awareness—and the nine principles of Trauma-Informed Mindful Eating.

Together, we'll explore:

  • The many influences that shape our relationships with nourishment
  • Trauma, stress, the nervous system, and food and body experiences
  • Interoception, embodiment, and connection with internal experience
  • Ways food behaviors can function as adaptations to lived experience
  • Food restriction, permission, and experiences of safety with food
  • Emotions, coping, and the different roles food can play
  • Body image and the experiences that shape how we relate to our bodies
  • Choice, agency, power, and the importance of honoring individual expertise
  • Curiosity as an alternative to judgment and prescription
  • Ways to integrate the TIME framework into personal exploration or professional practice
TIME isn't about arriving at one “right” way to eat.

It's about expanding our understanding of ourselves and others so that more choice becomes possible.

Designed for more than passive learning

TIME Foundations is self-paced, with opportunities throughout the training to experience, reflect, practice, and integrate what you're learning.

Your enrollment includes:

Prerecorded teaching
Move through the complete TIME Foundations curriculum at your own pace.

Experiential and interoceptive practices
Opportunities to experience concepts rather than only learn about them.

Reflection opportunities
Pause throughout the course to explore how the material connects with your own experiences, assumptions, and ways of understanding nourishment.

Role-play examples
See how the TIME lens can change the way conversations about food and the body unfold.

TIME e-book
A companion resource to support learning and integration throughout the training.

Reflection question resource
Questions that can be used for your own exploration or, when appropriate to your professional role and scope, in work with clients.

Research library
Access research articles that support and inform the TIME framework.

Community
A space to remain connected to others exploring and integrating this work.

One full year of access
Return to the lessons, practices, and materials as your understanding continues to develop.

Begin when you're ready.

TIME Foundations is fully self-paced. There is no cohort to wait for and no schedule you need to fit into.

Enroll and begin when it works for you. You'll have one full year to move through the training, revisit material, and allow the framework to unfold over time.

$449 · One Year Access

Cost shouldn't be the only factor determining access to this work. Scholarship opportunities are available.

Register Now
Apply for a Scholarship

Meet The People Behind TIME

Helena Benton
TCTSY-F, EdD, YACEP, IE-PRO, ERYT

Helena Benton is an Intuitive Eating Professional Coach and TCTSY Facilitator. She holds a doctorate degree in Education from Hamline University, where her research focused on how complex trauma therapists use TCTSY. A Yoga Alliance Continuing Education Provider, Helena has taught yoga and meditation for decades, focusing on helping professionals incorporate mindfulness into their fields of practice. She has extensive experience helping people gain advocacy and empowerment with food in her work as a wellness case manager. Her volunteer projects include working with horses at an equine therapy organization that treats veterans and first responders, and leading a study to explore the effects of therapy dog programs on vulnerable youth. Helena is the co-creator of Trauma-Informed Mindful Eating.  

Kristen Zappone
MS, RDN, LDN, IE-Pro

Kristen Zappone is a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist, Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor, Certified Mindful Eating Coach and 200 YTT certified.  Kristen specializes in helping individuals get to the root of food and body challenges by untangling the development of their relationship with food. Kristen worked as a Clinical Dietitian with children and adults with Cystic Fibrosis before moving into work as a wellness and chronic disease case manager and supervisor.  She has always been passionate about nutrition and its impact on our lives because of its essentiality.  Her desire to create a refreshed approach to food and body stemmed from understanding the ongoing difficulty of connecting to one’s own body exacerbated by diet culture.  Kristen is the co-creator of Trauma-Informed Mindful Eating.

Join the Community

Learn more about TIME
Stay informed about trainings & dates

Questions? Email us at [email protected]

Frequently Asked Questions

TIME Program

Participant Consent and Release

 

I, ___________________, consent to participate in the TIME program, and to attend one or more classes or activities of this program. I understand that my participation in this program does not replace psychotherapy or medical treatment, but rather serves as an adjunct to my primary psychotherapy and/or any and all other medically necessitated interventions. I further understand the participation in the TIME program is conditional upon maintenance of all clinically necessary intervention services

I further acknowledge that I fully understand that the TIME program modules may contain some physical activity and that there may be some risk. I agree to obtain prior medical clearance for my participation in any classes or activities of the TIME program and understand that it is my responsibility to verify with medical professionals the appropriateness of participating and any potential risks involved. I agree to make full disclosure of any and all medical conditions or physical limitations to the director of programming or the designees prior to the onset of any and all program services. I also agree to update program staff as the changes in my medical or physical condition.

I understand that the TIME program maintains the right to modify, discontinue or deny program services to me at any time. I hereby waive any and all liability of the TIME program, the CFTE, and all associated program staff or consultants for any injury that I may incur as a result of participation in these classes. Finally, I understand that TIME facilitators are not medical providers nor psychotherapists and that any questions regarding my health concerns should be brought to my licensed medical provider.

I also agree to the storing of my registration information as a legally valid electronic signature, per the MA UETA and Federal UTA.

Signed: ________________________________________ Date: ________________________________

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