When I first began my wellness journey it revolved around different diets in order to lose or maintain weight. However, I quickly found out that each time I was restricting myself I could feel my old eating disorder creep back in. The binge eating and the emotional rollercoaster towards food would only get worse instead of better. It wasn’t until I finally started to learn more about how to eat intuitively that my whole outlook on my nutrition and relationship towards food switched.
What is Intuitive Eating?
Intuitive eating is an approach where you are rejecting the rules of diet culture, listening to your own hunger and fullness cues and creating a positive relationship towards food.
One of the most beneficial outcomes with intuitive eating is that you’re no longer having to follow strict dieting rules. It’s more about really listening to your body and realizing when you’re truly hungry and full.
Studies have found that those who practice intuitive eating have better body image, lower levels of disordered eating and lower levels of anxiety and depression.
10 Principles to Eating Intuitively
- Reject the Diet Mentality
- How often do you look at a certain type of food and think, “oh no I can’t have that, it isn’t what I’m supposed to eat” That happened to me far too often. And then I would start obsessing over what I couldn’t have which would just lead to me binging on whatever food I was depriving myself of. Or I was going down the spiral of completely losing it. Instead we need to realize that diets don’t work for the vast majority of people and can really only help trigger disordered eating.
- Honor Your Hunger
- You’re allowed to be hungry. Trying to limit yourself to only eating X amount of times throughout the day can lead to not listening to your hunger cues causing you to overeat. If we would listen when our body says it’s hungry we could nourish it with a healthy option instead of depriving it and no longer having the ability to refrain from eating all the foods to fill us up quickly.
- Make Peace with Food
- When we deprive ourselves of foods that we want to eat it starts to lead us to obsessing about them. We have been told that instead of pasta eat zoodles to be “healthy” but that doesn’t always have to be the case. Sometimes we just need to honor that we want the bowl of pasta and take the time to enjoy the delicious flavors while we eat it.
- Challenge the Food Police
- Stop labeling food as good or bad. This only creates a negative relationship towards your nutrition. If you think all donuts are bad and you enjoy one at the apple orchard with your friends you will then have this feeling that you did something wrong. Know that all food serves a purpose and is ok to enjoy.
- Discover Satisfaction
- Allow yourself to learn to feel satisfied when eating all sorts of food. Notice how they make you feel inside while you’re eating them. Eat slowly to really learn that even more of an unhealthy food choice can still lead to satisfaction.
- Feel Your Fullness
- Sometimes we start to eat so quickly because we’ve waiting too long to eat or feel guilty for indulging in a certain type of food. However this doesn’t allow our brains to really connect with our stomachs to let us know when we are full until we have far surpassed that. Slowly eating allows us to recognize when we are full and to accept that we are allowed to be full from food. Also, remind yourself you don’t have to over eat something because you can never have it again. It will be there again tomorrow for you to enjoy so it’s ok to stop when full.
- Coping with Emotions
- Eating is also emotional. Food can provide comfort and pleasure. However if we keep choosing food that is only nutritious for us we can lose out on that pleasure feeling and start to have a negative outlook towards food.
- Respect Your Body
- You must treat your body with respect in the here and now. Even though you may be wanting your body to be in a better place, your body still deserves to eat food here and now. You still owe it to yourself to nourish your body and not feel guilty about that.
- Enjoyable Movement
- When people are often trying to lose weight they think that a strict diet and intense fitness routine is the key to getting there. However, by doing so you start to put too much pressure on yourself. This can lead to excessive working out to “burn off” the bad food you ate the night before. Know our bodies need movement for so many other reasons than to punish them for what you ate the night before.
- Gentle Nutrition
- Once we have understood how to become in tune with our bodies, we can then bring back the knowledge to support our food decisions. It is first important to trust your internal guide and then can use the external nutritional information we have to further guide towards of final food choice. A healthy relationship with food and connection with your body is the most important part of healthy eating, only when you have trust in your body can food knowledge support a healthy way of eating.
The Bottom Line
Intuitive eating can help people to break free from diet culture and create a positive relationship towards food. Once you start to honor your body and learn how to respect your hunger and fullness cues, you can achieve a more mindful and joyous approach to eating.
If you’re still struggling with how to get started and find that peace towards food click here to apply to work with me in my 1 on 1 program Living a Balanced Life. This is a great way to hone in and find the tools in order to build a more positive outlook on your well-being.
