What is Intuitive Eating?
INTUITVE EATING is a way to personally cultivate a healthy relationship with food, mind, and body. What does that mean though? Intuitive eating, simply put, is allowing your body to give signals of hunger and fullness and you responding to those signals with the intent of honoring them and what your body needs.
DOES THAT MEAN EATING WHATEVER YOU WANT, WHENEVER YOU WANT?
Well, kind of. But there's more to it than that. It's not just eating WHATEVER WHENEVER. It's :
eating foods that make you feel good and that will fuel your body
listening to your body's natural cues of hunger and responding by eating
recognizing when your body is telling you it's satisfied and full and stopping there
knowing that you can have more of that certain food later and it will be available to you if you want it
knowing that you can have whatever foods you want and also eating a variety of foods to help fuel your body
Eating intuitively is allowing yourself all types of foods and allowing yourself to enjoy foods. It's not labeling foods as good or bad, but knowing that all foods can fit into a healthy diet. It's eating and enjoying your food and moving on with your day without looking back with feelings of guilt for what you ate.
WHY AREN’T WE ALL EATING INTUITIVELY?
Kids are the best intuitive eaters. They sometimes leave food on they're plate because they're full, they ask for more of a certain food that they really like, they don't place any judgements on food. We all start out that way but are taught all kinds of diet messages and over time we start to disregard how our body feels and we tell our bodies we know better. We unlearn intuitive eating. The good news is you can learn how to become an intuitive eater again! You can let go of the guilt you feel for eating certain foods. You can learn to listen to your body and trust when it tells you it's hungry and when it's full.
HOW TO RELEARN INTUITIVE EATING
So how do we focus on intuitive eating and start responding to our bodies? There are 10 principles of intuitive eating.
1. Reject the Diet Mentality
You have to throw out any diet plans, eating schedules, and food rules. These only offer the false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently. You need to get angry. Angry at a diet culture that promotes weight loss. Angry that a diet culture has led you to feel like a failure every time a new diet stops working. If you allow even the smallest of hopes to linger that there is a new diet lurking around the corner, it will stop you from being free to rediscover Intuitive Eating.
2. Honor your hunger
Keep your body biologically fed with adequate energy and carbohydrates. Otherwise, you can trigger a primal drive to overeat. Once you reach the moment of excessive hunger, all intentions of moderate, conscious eating are fleeting and irrelevant. Learning to honor this first biological signal sets the stage for rebuilding trust in yourself and in food.
3. Make Peace with Food
Call a truce; stop the food fight! Give yourself unconditional permission to eat. You don't have to earn, save, or schedule your food. A mindset of can't or shouldn't for particular foods, will only lead to extreme feelings of deprivation. These feelings will often turn into uncontrollable cravings and binging. When you finally “give in” to your forbidden foods, eating will be experienced with such intensity it usually results in overeating and overwhelming guilt.
4. Challenge the Food Police
Time to tame the voice in your head that says you're "good" for eating a minimal number of calories or "bad" because you ate cookies.
The food police monitor the unreasonable rules that diet culture has created. The police station is housed deep in your psyche, and its loudspeaker shouts negative barbs, hopeless phrases, and guilt-provoking indictments. Chasing the food police away is a critical step in returning to Intuitive Eating.
5. Discover the Satisfaction Factor
In our compulsion to comply with diet culture, we often overlook one of the most basic gifts of existence—the pleasure and satisfaction that can be found in the eating experience. When you eat what you really want, in an environment that is inviting, the pleasure you derive will be a powerful force in helping you feel satisfied and content. By giving this experience for yourself, you will find that it takes just the right amount of food for you to decide you’ve had “enough.”
6. Feel your Fulness
In order to honor your fullness, you need to trust that you will give yourself the foods that you desire. Listen for the body signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry. Observe the signs that show that you’re comfortably full. Pause in the middle of eating and ask yourself how the food tastes, and what your current hunger level is.
7. Cope with your Emotions with Kindness
Recognize that food restriction, both physically and mentally, can trigger loss of control, which can feel like emotional eating. Find kind ways to comfort, nurture, and resolve your issues.
Food won’t fix your feelings of loss, anger, or anxiety. It may comfort for the short term, distract from the pain, or even numb you. But food won’t solve the problem. You ultimately have to deal with the source of the emotion.
8. Respect your Body
Accept your genetic blueprint. Just as a person with a shoe size of eight would not expect to realistically squeeze into a size six, it is equally futile (and uncomfortable) to have a similar expectation about body size.
Respect your body so you can feel better about who you are. It’s hard to reject the diet mentality if you are unrealistic and overly critical of your body size or shape. All bodies deserve dignity. All bodies are designed differently. Let you be you.
9. Movement-Feel the Difference
Just get up and get active! No need for a routine or planned movement. Shift your focus to how your body feels when you move, rather than how many calories you'll burn or what you'll look like after. If you focus on how you feel from working out, such as energized, each day your mind will feel freer and happy with movement instead of run down and exhausted.
10. Honor your Health with Gentle Nutrition
Make food choices that honor your health and taste buds while making you feel good. Remember that you don’t have to eat perfectly to be healthy. You will not suddenly get a nutrient deficiency or become unhealthy, from one snack, one meal, or one day of eating. It’s what you eat consistently over time that matters. Progress, not perfection, is what counts.
Do you trust your body when it comes to food? Do you struggle with guilty feelings around eating food? Do you feel out of control while eating? If so, our dietitian, Emily, can help you heal your relationship with food, teach you how to become an intuitive eater, and help you build trust with your body again.