Intuitive eating is an ideology that focuses on you, the individual, being the master of your body’s hunger signals. There are no traditional diet rules about what you should eat and avoid. Instead, intuitive eating trains you to be the best person to make your food choices by understanding what your body says whenever it communicates through signals and sensations.
For example, we have been conditioned to believe that sugary foods like sweets are bad and eating them when on a diet should make us feel guilty. Intuitive eating tackles this by fostering guilt-free snacking while respecting food limitation boundaries.
This article explains intuitive eating through 10 key principles as described in Tribole and Resch’s book on the same.
THE PRINCIPLES OF INTUITIVE EATING
- Reject the diet mentality and make peace with food: Intuitive eating is the anti-diet routine that tells us to not deceive ourselves by consistently relying on diets. This way you are at peace with your food and you will not deprive yourself of your favorite foods.
- Honor your hunger and respect your fullness: Rebuild the relationship with food by responding early to hunger signals and eating well. Do not go hungry and then overeat later. Also, keep a check on how the food tastes as you eat and respect your body enough to stop eating when it signals that you are full.
- Discover the satisfaction factor: Many of us have forgotten that we need to enjoy the foods we eat. When we eat what we want to eat in an environment that makes us feel happy, then we will not need as much food to reach fullness. Enabling a positive food experience helps trigger hunger satisfaction signals earlier, with lesser quantities of food.
- Challenge the food police: Nullify thoughts that praise you for staying under calories and at the same time, do not feel guilty about indulging in a favorite sweet-treat either. Food is neither bad nor good and our self-worth for the day should not be dictated by the food we eat that day.
- Honor your feelings without using food: We all experience anxiety, boredom, loneliness and anger from time to time. But the solution to all these triggers should not be about eating the feeling away. Rather than focusing on short-term solutions with food, facing those problems head-on achieves long-term peace without resorting to food to numb the pain.
- Respect your body and honor your health: Please do not persistently focus on the flaws of your body; accept the flaws without hesitation. Do not have unrealistic goals for your health and always remember that consistent progress matters more than perfection. Any single meal cannot make or break your overall health.
- Exercise – feel the difference: Switch your focus to finding movements and workouts that energize you and make you feel good. Enjoying a workout motivates you to exercise better than stressing about burning fat or losing weight.
Willing to try out intuitive eating? Keep us posted on your progress!
