What Is Intuitive Eating?

The concept of intuitive eating is straightforward. It denotes that you’ve come to terms with a wide variety of foods. Unlike traditional diets which limit or prohibit particular foods, intuitive eating urges you to cease categorizing food as “good” or “bad.” Rather, you pay attention to your body and consume what feels good to you.
This could be interpreted as being free to consume anything you want, whenever you want. This isn’t the case in the least. Intuitive eating, according to experts, is relying on your body’s inherent ability to tell you when you’re hungry or full. When you eat intuitively, you let go of the notion that you need to lose or gain weight to achieve a certain appearance. The goal is to assist you in focusing on foods that are beneficial to your bodily and mental well-being.

Mindful Eating vs Intuitive Eating

By following your own inner wisdom and using all of your senses to choose food that is both delicious and nourishing to your body, “mindful eating” allows you to be aware of the positive and nurturing opportunities afforded by food selection and preparation. You can know right away that intuitive eating incorporates mindful eating practices. It goes even further, emphasizing the need of rejecting the dieting attitude, loving one’s body regardless of size or form, coping with emotional eating, and gentle movement and nutrition without judgment. Both mindful eating and intuitive eating can be helpful tools in guiding you to a point where you can eat in a way that is most beneficial to your body.

10 Key Principles of Intuitive Eating

Reject Diet Mentality

A diet mentality means that a person is constantly mindful of food and how they believe it impacts their body. In order to appear a specific way or “be healthier,” they filter their food choices through the diet mentality. A diet mentality can be hazardous, especially if it is maintained over a lengthy period of time. Individuals who have a diet mentality choose their foods based on that attitude, and they don’t always consider hunger, urges, or what their bodies want. Each of these elements is taken into account by intuitive eating.

Honor your Hunger

Your body needs to know and trust that it will have access to food on a regular basis. When you try to suppress hunger by not eating enough calories and carbohydrates, your body responds by increasing cravings and appetite, increasing the risk of bingeing or feeling out of control around food. Have you ever felt hungry but didn’t eat because you didn’t want to? Why is that? To begin honoring your appetite, you might want to consider using the hunger-fullness scale. Keep in mind that if you don’t acknowledge each hunger signal, it will be difficult to do this in a way that is healthy for your body. Dismissing some hunger cues further isolates you from your body, making it more difficult to eat healthily.

Make Peace with Food

Working to incorporate all foods into your diet and giving yourself unconditional permission to eat whatever you want is the goal of this approach. When you’re labeling foods as “good” or “bad,” look for the gray region to help food become more neutral. If you tell yourself you can’t or shouldn’t eat something, you’ll soon feel deprived, which can lead to uncontrollable desires and overeating.

Challenging the Food Police

The food cops are the voices in your head that tell you that you’re “good” for eating a salad for lunch and “bad” for eating dessert/carbs/sugar/etc. These are the irrational restrictions that dieting has imposed on you, making you feel bad. These principles are ingrained in your mind and surface on a daily basis to guide your eating choices. When the food police are in charge, it’s impossible to see eating as a normal, joyful activity. Defying the food police is a crucial step on the path to becoming an intuitive eater.

Discover the Satisfaction Factor

The terms “fullness” and “satisfaction” are not interchangeable. Physically full but unsatisfied is a possibility. If you’re hungry, you’ll keep hunting for that one thing that will make you feel satisfied and pleased, and it might be difficult to feel “done” eating if you’re not satiated. The sensations of fulfillment and pleasure you experience when you eat what you actually want, including food that you’re in the mood for and food that tastes good to you, will help you be content and truly feel “done.”

Keep an Eye out for Fullness

Pause frequently while eating to check in with your body. Consider how the food tastes and how hungry you are to evaluate if you require more. Also, take time to enjoy the act of eating. You’ll know you’ve had enough when you’re pleased and happy.

Cope Kindly with your Emotions

To begin, recognize that physical and emotional food limitation can lead to a loss of control, which can show as emotional eating. Find gentle ways to soothe, nourish, divert, and address your problems. We all suffer anxiety, loneliness, boredom, and rage at some point in our lives. Each one has its own set of triggers and appeasements. Food isn’t going to make any of these sensations go away. It may provide temporary relief, distract you from the discomfort, or even numb you, however, food will not cure the situation. Eating to satisfy an emotional hunger may, on the contrary, make you feel worse in the long run. You’ll have to deal with the cause of the emotion in the end.

Respect your Body

Listening to your body, caring for it physically and mentally, being kind and sympathetic to it, and appreciating it as it is right now are all examples of body respect. You can respect your body regardless of how you feel about it because respect begins with the recognition that you are valued and deserving of care exactly as you are. Regardless of how your body seems, functions, or affects your emotions. Respecting your body begins when you recognize your intrinsic and eternal worth as a human. Just as a person with a shoe size of eight would not expect to really fit into a size six, having a similar expectation concerning body size is fruitless and uncomfortable. If you are unrealistic and too critical of your physical size or shape, it is difficult to reject the diet mentality.

Exercise Regularly

Many of us think of exercise as something we “should” do or as something to cross off our to-do list. We know it’s beneficial for us, yet we either dread doing it, force ourselves to do it, or struggle to do it at all. Exercise becomes something we “have to” or “should” do, rather than something we “like” to do, especially in our weight-focused and appearance-driven world. This is also why many people find it difficult to begin or maintain a regular fitness routine. Paying attention to, and connecting with your body is the practice of intuitive movement. Shift your focus away from the exercise you think you “should” be doing and toward the forms of activity that feel good to you. Instead of focusing on the calorie-burning effect of exercise, consider how you feel afterward. Do you have a lot of energy? Do you get more restful sleep now? If you only exercise to lose weight or eat more food, it is unlikely that you will stick with it indefinitely.

Honor your Health – Gentle Nutrition

Being healthy does not imply that you must eat “perfectly.” Take into account how particular foods make you feel as well as how good and enjoyable they are. It’s not all or nothing; it’s the consistency of what you eat over time. Nutrition can sometimes be perceived by the body as a type of limitation if we’re still stuck in a diet mindset. As a result, some people find it beneficial to focus on other principles before embracing gentle nutrition. Gentle nutrition, simply put, is eating from a perspective of self-care rather than one of restriction and control. Can you think of nutrition as what things you can add in rather than what foods you should cut back on or eliminate? Experiment to learn which nutrient-dense meals you appreciate the most and how to prepare them in an enticing and tasty manner.

Now that you Know…

The benefits of intuitive eating have already been proven in over 100 research studies. According to research, intuitive eating is linked to:

• Increased self-esteem
• Improved self-esteem
• More contentment with life
• Optimism and happiness
• Coping techniques that are proactive
• HDL cholesterol levels that are higher
• Lower rates of triglyceride levels
• Emotional eating is less common
• Lower rates of eating disorders