Intuitive Eating

I recently read a good blog post about intuitive eating by Lauren Fowler and wanted to share some bits and pieces of it. There are ten principles of intuitive eating and they are used to guide your eating and to help heal your relationship with food. This might be especially helpful to athletes after months of strict dieting for a show. Intuitive eating serves to help us listen to our bodies rather than our rational minds. Intuitive eating is meant to be about intuition- your instinctive feeling rather than a rational reasoning. This means listening to your body and what it needs. It helps you get in tune with what your body is truly craving. Intuitive eating become natural. It’s meant to keep you from obsessing about food from a diet perspective. 

The ten principles from the book Intuitive Eating are: 

1. Reject the diet mentality 
2. Honor your hunger 
3. Make peace with food 
4. Challenge the food police 
5. Respect your fullness 
6. Discover the satisfaction factor 
7. Honor your feelings without using food 
8. Respect your body 
9. Exercise- feel the difference 
10. Honor your health 

These ten principles are meant to help you make peace with food. You are allowing your body to naturally find its healthy and happy weight. It’s not easy to make this switch after dieting and especially after being so strict after competition prep, but it is meant to help you find freedom around food. You will find that food is fuel for your body and can be a source of pleasure or a way to socially connect. 

Not everyone is interested in intuitive eating. You might be more than okay with logging into MyFitnessPal and tracking your meals every day and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. I currently do not intuitively eat, but am interested in trying it. Intuitive eating might also be a great idea for someone who is always trying out the newest diet that they hear about and ultimately ends up failing and feeling frustrated. 

Lauren Fowler touches on many reasons why you should stop dieting today and switch to intuitive eating. Deprivation does not work. The restrictive mindset often leads to eating healthy all day, only to come home and binge on the “off limit” foods. By giving yourself permission to enjoy all foods, no one food will have power over you. Dieting can be stressful to the body due to the constant cycle of restriction and overeating. This not only destroys your metabolism, but also wrecks your self confidence. It also causes you to lose touch with your body’s intuitive signals of hunger, fullness, and satisfaction. Diets focus on weight rather than wellness and on numbers, rather than food. Eat to nourish your body and remember that food is just one part of your life- not your entire life. Don’t let dieting keep you from being present in life. Don’t focus on the next time you can eat, what you’re allowed to eat, or worrying about what the scale reads.