What is intuitive eating and how do we start?
The topic of intuitive eating has been floating around our universe lately and we love it. It’s totally up our stream because, it reinforces the idea of personal empowerment when it comes to our own health. As important as it is to turn to doctors, nutritionists and specialists of all kinds to optimize our health, learning to trust and connect with our own feelings, intuitions about what and when we eat and other health and wellness matters is pivotal as well.
Evelyn Tribole, MS, RD is the author of Intuitive Eating, the Intuitive Eating Workbook and the brand new, Intuitive Eating for Every Day: 365 Daily Practices & Inspirations to Rediscover the Pleasures of Eating. In Intuitive Eating for Every Day, Tribole lays out a path to living by these ten principles. We summarized them in this blog post. If they resonate with you, we highly recommend doing a full deep dive into her latest book!
The 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating
Intuitive eating is a compassionate, self-care eating framework that treats all bodies with the utmost of dignity and respect. It’s a dynamic interplay of thought, emotion, and instinct rooted in listening to your body’s sensations through a process called interoceptive awareness.
REJECT THE DIET MENTALITY | Throw out the diet plans and articles that offer you the false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently. Instead, question diet culture and fads that promote weight loss and an unsustainable way of eating. If you allow even one small hope to linger that a new and better diet or food plan might be lurking around the corner, it will prevent you from being free to rediscover Intuitive Eating.
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.
MAKE PEACE WITH FOOD | Call a truce; stop the food fight! Give yourself unconditional permission to eat. If you tell yourself that you can’t or shouldn’t have a particular food, it can lead to intense feelings of deprivation that build into uncontrollable craving resulting often in, bingeing. When you finally “give in” to your forbidden foods, eating will be experienced with such intensity it usually results in Last Supper overeating and overwhelming guilt.
CHALLENGE THE FOOD POLICE | Scream a loud “no” to thoughts in your head that declare you’re “good” for eating minimal calories or “bad” because you ate a piece of chocolate cake. 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.
DISCOVER THE SATISFACTION FACTOR | In our obsession to acquiesce with diet culture, we often overlook one of the most basic pleasures of existence—the pleasure and delight 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.
FEEL YOUR FULLNESS | In order to appreciate your fullness, you need to trust that you will give yourself the foods that you desire. Listen for the cues that your body is giving you, signalling that tell you are full. Pause in the middle of eating and ask yourself how the food tastes, and what your current hunger level is.
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, distract, and resolve your issues. Anxiety, loneliness, boredom, and anger are emotions we all experience throughout life. Each has its own trigger, and each has its own appeasement. Food won’t fix any of these feelings. It may provide comfort in the short term, distract from the pain, or even numb you. But food won’t solve the problem. If anything, eating for emotional hunger may only make you feel worse in the long run. You’ll ultimately have to address the source of the emotion.
RESPECT YOUR BODY | Accept your genetic blueprint. Just as a person with a shoe size of eight would not realistically expect to squeeze into a size six. Therefore, it’s equally futile (and uncomfortable) to have a similar expectation about body size. But mostly, 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 love.
MOVEMENT—FEEL THE DIFFERENCE | Forget militant exercise. Just get active and feel the difference. Change your focus to how it feels to move your body, rather than the calorie-burning effect of exercise. Focusing how you feel from your workout changes the perspective from calorie burning to something more enjoyable and natural.
HONOUR YOUR HEALTH WITH GENTLE NUTRITION | Make food choices that honour 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 or one meal. It’s what you eat consistently over time that matters. Progress, not perfection, is what counts.
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