Eating in a healthful and mindful way historically has been interpreted as calorie counting, carb avoiding, and other limiting food practices. Now, there is a better way to approach nourishing your body through a wellness concept known as intuitive eating. Intuitive eating trusts your body’s signals and nutrition cues over the latest diet trends. Let’s explore how to trust yourself to make the best choices for your individual needs.
1. A Nourishing Journey: Exploring Intuitive Eating
Intuitive Eating is a way of listening to and trusting in your body’s natural hunger and fullness cues. It is an approach to nourishing yourself that involves tuning into your physical, emotional, and mental cues in order to decide what you eat and how much. It is a liberating approach that is free from the rules and restrictions of typical diets, aiming to promote respect for the self and the food we eat.
At the heart of Intuitive Eating is the idea of relinquishing control over food and eating. Practitioners of this approach learn to rely more on their body’s inner wisdom regarding hunger, fullness, and cravings. That is, instead of following a rigid diet, you learn to identify and respond to your body’s needs and recognize your eating patterns without judgement.
To begin, it is important to know that it is not a diet or a plan, but a philosophy of attuning with one’s body to decide what to eat. To start practicing Intuitive Eating, here are some tips for nourishing your body:
- Allow yourself to eat what you want: There are no off-limits foods when it comes to Intuitive Eating. You are free to indulge occasionally in treats if you feel like it.
- Scrutinize your hunger levels: Start to become aware of your level of hunger at different times of the day. Ask yourself when you’re really hungry and when you are just reaching for food for emotional support.
- Unconditionally nourish yourself: Allow yourself to eat without guilt or judgement. Make sure to feed your body with a variety of nutritious foods necessary for overall health.
Intuitive Eating is all about trusting your body and listening to it, recognizing the cues and signals it receives and then responding in a respectful way. It takes practice and understanding to learn how to trust your body and eat intuitively. Practicing Intuitive Eating is liberating and a journey towards a healthy and respectful relationship with food and our own bodies.
2. Making Room for Pleasure: Trust Yourself
Learning to trust yourself is an empowering journey of self-discovery. It’s a process that takes courage as we peel away the layers of self-doubt and uncover our true strengths. It is by allowing ourselves to experience pleasure that we can begin to trust ourselves. Consider these tips for making room for pleasure in your life.
Identify Pleasure Sources
To make room for pleasure, first you need to identify what brings you pleasure and joy. Start by making a list of activities that bring you joy. Let your curiosity lead you, no matter how ‘silly’ or ‘small’ the activity may seem. We all need down-time even if that means lying on the sofa with your favourite show. Whatever it is that you enjoy, make room for it in your life.
Schedule Pleasurable Activities
Creating time for pleasure is all about making it a priority. You can do this by scheduling it into your routine, just like you would for any other important activity. You could potentially plan pleasurable activities at a certain time weekly, bi-monthly, or whatever works best for you. When it’s part of your weekly schedule, it’s guaranteed to make you feel happier and more fulfilled in life.
Allow Yourself To Let Go
Learning to trust yourself and to allow yourself to experience pleasure means learning to let go and have faith in yourself and your goals. This means taking time and space to be with yourself and giving yourself permission to go against the grain and walk your own path.
Believe in Your Intuition
Your intuition is a powerful source of guidance, and trusting it is an essential part of allowing yourself to experience pleasure. Learning to understand and trust your intuition is like practicing a muscle; the more you engage with it, the stronger it will become.
Embrace Self-Care
Learning to trust yourself and embrace pleasure means prioritising self-care. Make a commitment to yourself to care for your physical, emotional and mental wellbeing. Self-care can mean different things to different people, but it could include:
- Gentle exercise such as yoga or going for a walk
- Spending time with friends and family
- Treating yourself with kindness and compassion
- Reducing stress with music, nature or relaxation
By making space for pleasure in our lives, we can learn to trust ourselves and experience greater joy and wellbeing.
3. Unlearning Diet Culture: Listen to Your Body
The concept of dieting and restricting what you eat is deeply embedded in our culture. While diet culture seems to be everywhere, it’s important to unlearn how we experience food and to begin to listen to what our bodies need. Here is how to start unlearning diet culture while listening to your body:
- Understand the impact of diet culture on your life. Diet culture impacts the way we think about food, our bodies, and ultimately our health. It supports mainstream attitudes and beliefs that create an environment of shame around our bodies. It’s important to take a step back and reflect on how diet culture has impacted our relationships with food and our body.
- Give yourself permission to enjoy food. We are often trained to think that certain foods are “bad” and others are “good”. That mentality has been ingrained in us. We need to give ourselves permission to enjoy food and to listen to our cravings. Eating should be a joy, and it’s okay to enjoy the foods we want to eat!
- Recognize the power of being mindful. Mindful eating is about being in tune with your body and responding to what it needs. Being mindful means being aware of what you eat and why you eat it. It’s important to recognize triggers that lead to unhealthy eating habits and to practice being more mindful with your meals.
- Engage in self-care activities. Self-care activities can be anything from going for a walk to going out for dinner with friends. It’s important to make time for activities that are enjoyable and will help you disconnect from diet culture thoughts that tell you what you should and shouldn’t eat.
Unlearning diet culture can be a challenge, but it’s also an important process in developing a healthy relationship with food and your body. It requires self-awareness and listening to what your body needs. It’s about changing our habits to support our health and happiness, rather than relying on what society tells us.
The process of unlearning diet culture begins with listening to your body. It means taking the time to truly understand what your body needs and giving yourself permission to enjoy the foods that make you happy. So challenge yourself to be mindful and listen to what your body needs.
4. Cultivating a Healthier Relationship with Food: Reclaiming Autonomy
It’s no secret that our relationship with food has become more complicated. As parents, we worry about making the right food choices for our kids, while food manufacturers bombard us with marketing campaigns claiming their food is the healthiest. Our relationship with food has become tangled in a web of competing interests, and nowhere is this more clear than in our relationship with our own diets.
When it comes to reclaiming autonomy around our diets, the first step is to take back ownership of our food choices. That means ditching the diet books and the fad diets, and instead focusing on nourishment and pleasure. For example, try adding some pleasure into your meals by spending a little extra time selecting ingredients you really enjoy eating. To get started, take a few moments to hone in on the foods you enjoy – the smells, the flavours, the textures – and build your meals around them. It’s amazing how a few simple tweaks can make meals more enjoyable.
Another way to reclaim autonomy is to practice mindful eating. Mindful eating means making the effort to stay present while we eat – savouring each bite as we go, and noticing our body’s signals. Not only will this help you to stay more in tune with your body’s needs, it can also help you to feel more connected to your meal.
Lastly, take time to understand how different foods make you feel. Consider paying attention to how your body reacts to different foods, and use this information to plan nutritious meals that don’t leave you feeling drained or sluggish. A great way to get started is to keep a food diary and track your energy levels after eating. That way you can become more familiar with which foods contribute the best fuel to your body.
Reclaiming autonomy over our food choices is a journey that often takes time and a lot of self-reflection. But by taking small steps to become more mindful eaters, and by prioritising pleasure over perfection, we can all begin cultivating a healthier and more satisfying relationship with food.
Intuitive eating is a mindful approach to nourishment that involves connecting and trusting the body’s natural signals for hunger and satiety. Instead of relying on external cues or a rigid plan, intuitive eaters trust their bodies as the ultimate source of nourishment. Releasing the pressure to fit into a certain mold can allow us to discover our natural preferences for what and how much our body needs. Intuitive eating is an empowering tool for fostering a healthier, more balanced relationship with food.
