10 Principles of Intuitive Eating That May Change Your Perspective

 

What exactly is intuitive eating? Most people don’t know what it is or are familiar with it in any way.

Intuitive eating is an evidence-based eating framework that involves elements of psychology, behavior change, self-awareness, intuition and instinct. It is a combination of these things.

At its core, intuitive eating is a way of tuning into, and connecting with your body and your unique needs, in a way that you are learning to trust your body and the biological signals that we receive every day — such as hunger levels and fullness. This also includes weight.

There are many psychological, mental, emotional and physical benefits to eating intuitively. Things like improving your self-esteem, your body image, reducing anxiety and depression, helping to reduce eating disorders and, in some cases, reducing obesity. Overall, it improves quality of life.

There are 10 principles which cultivate our awareness of our bodies and the signals it is sending us:

1. Reject the Diet Mentality. We are inundated all of the time with diets, quick fixes, eat this, don’t eat that and countless weight loss plans. We need to let go of all of these rules we feel the need to adhere to ,and make us feel like a failure when we “fall off the wagon”. On the whole, diets have been demonstrated to go against our biology, and to usually fail.
2. Honor Your Hunger. This is a really helpful skill that you can learn to develop over time if you’re not used to it. Hunger is your body’s way of signaling to you that it needs fuel. It is a primal need that we have. It is very important that we supply our bodies with nutrition when it signals hunger. Restricting food can trigger a very primal drive to overeat. When we learn to trust our bodies and tune in to our hunger signals before we reach that point, we learn that we can trust our bodies again.
3. Make Peace with Food. Give yourself permission to allow all foods in your diet. When we restrict certain foods from our diet, it actually makes us want those foods more. It makes those foods hold more power over us. When you give yourself permission to allow all foods in your diet, you discover that a lot of those foods that were once forbidden are no longer as exciting as they once were.
4. Challenge the Food Police. Is there such a thing as the Food Police? Yes. It’s made up of the thoughts and the stories that we tell ourselves about eating a certain way (“this food is bad, why did I do that?, etc.). These are thoughts that make food a stressful thing for us. The food police is rooted in our psyche from many years of diet beliefs and behaviors. You challenge the food police by asking yourself compassionately where these thoughts are coming from and replacing some of those thoughts with more positive ones.
5. Discover the Satisfaction Factor. Our eating experience is made up of so many factors — tradition, culture, social connection, friends, family, etc. The environment that we cultivate a sense of satisfaction around the food that we eat. When we have these things in place, food is no longer just about food, you are finding pleasure around the eating experience and you no longer feel like you have to overindulge because you’re feeling satisfied on all levels.
6. Feel Your Fullness. Along with eating the foods that you intuitively desire, it’s important to pay attention to the signals that your body sends us that let us know that we are full and no longer hungry. We can tune into this better by practicing more mindfulness around our mealtime. This would involve slowing down with your meals, putting your fork down between bites, chewing thoroughly. Also, try pausing in the middle of your meal and asking yourself, “What are my hunger levels at? Am I starting to feel full? Am I satisfied?”. Be mindful about your eating.
7. Cope With Your Emotions With Kindness. Anxiety, anger, frustration, sadness, loneliness, boredom — these are emotional states that all of us experience sometimes, and food can act as a way to comfort us, to distract us, or to numb us. But it doesn’t help us to get to the root of why we are feeling that way. It cannot fix these things. With intuitive eating, we are learning to check in with ourselves with not only what we are eating but why we are eating it.
8. Respect Your Body.This is about developing a deep appreciation and acceptance for your body and your genetic blueprint. It can be quite the perspective shift when you can recognize that all our bodies are vastly different. Try to get into the perspective of recognizing and appreciating what your body is capable of. When we shift our perspective from what what we look like to what our bodies are able to do for us, it makes it so much easier for us to let go of a dieting mentality where we are being unrealistic or hypocritical of our bodies. Bodies jiggle, skin wrinkles. These things are normal and it’s all okay.
9. Movement: Feel The Difference. Try to shift your perspective from believing that exercise is always high intensity, sweating profusely, always about burning calories, or getting into some angle of looking a certain way. Instead, focus on how good it physically feels to move your body. Our bodies were designed to move. It doesn’t have to be so intense all of the time. Sometimes it could mean going for a walk. Other times it could mean dancing around your living room or doing yoga.
10. Honor Your Health With Gentle Nutrition. This is all about making food choices that taste good to you and you enjoy eating and also nourish your body and make you feel good. It’s important to understand that it’s not about eating perfectly all of the time. We do not need to eat perfectly clean food all the time in order to lead a healthy lifestyle. The way that we eat changes some days — things pop up on our schedule and we go for it. One day’s worth of eating does not determine our state of health.

Intuitive Eating is about making choices that make you feel good and nourish your body but knowing that it’s okay to not be perfect. Happy eating my friends!!!