The term ‘intuitive eating’ refers to a philosophy of eating which makes you the expert of your body as well as its hunger signals. In a nutshell, it’s the exact opposite of a traditional diet. Intuitive eating doesn’t impose guidelines regarding what to avoid as well as what or when to eat. Instead, this type of eating teaches that you are the best person — the only person — to make those nutrition choices. The exercise of intuitive eating teaches you how to get to grips your body cues such as hunger, fullness and satisfaction. This is all while learning to trust your body around food again.
Your Start With Intuitive Eating
To eat intuitively, you could need to re-learn how to trust your body. To accomplish this, you need to distinguish between physical as opposed to emotional hunger:
Physical Hunger
This biological urge tells you that you need to replenish nutrients. Physical hunger builds up slowly and has a number of different signals, such as a growling stomach, tiredness, or irritability. This type of hunger is satisfied when you eat any food.
Emotional Hunger
This type of hunger is driven by emotional need. Sadness, loneliness as well as boredom are some of the feelings which can create cravings for food, often comfort foods. Eating then causes guilt and self-hatred.
Discard The Diet Mentality
Get rid of the diet books as well as magazine articles which offer you the false hope of losing weight quickly, easily as well as permanently. Become angry at diet culture which promotes weight loss and the lies which have led you to feel as though you were a failure each and every time that a new diet stopped working and you put on all of the weight. If you allow even one tiny hope to linger – that a new and better diet or eating plan might be lurking around the corner – it will prevent you from being free to rediscover intuitive eating.
Deal With Your Emotions With Kindness
Firstly, recognise that food restriction – both physically and mentally – may in and of itself trigger loss of control. This in turn can feel like emotional eating.
Find kind ways to comfort, nurture, distract as well as resolve your issues. Anxiety, loneliness, boredom, and anger are emotions that we all experience throughout life. Each of these emotions has its own trigger. Each of them has its own appeasement.
Food won’t fix any of these feelings. It may serve to comfort you in the short term, distract you from the pain, or even numb you. However, food won’t solve the problem. If anything, eating for an emotional hunger could only make you feel worse in the long run. Ultimately, you’ll have to deal with the source of the emotion.
Perpetual dieters may have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the calorie, fat as well as carbohydrate content of different foods. Unfortunately, they forget what they enjoy eating and what helps them to feel full.
Choose meals and snacks which are nutritious but are also satisfying and tasty. And keep in mind that one slip does not mean a fall. A meal or one day where you don’t eat particularly healthily will not make a difference in the long term – it’s what happens on most days which matters.
Contact Trifocus Fitness Academy
An exercise and nutrition coach helps people to overcome issues such as a negative relationship with food. If you’re interested in learning more then you need to do our Advanced Exercise and Nutrition Coach Course. Learn more here.
