What Is Intuitive Eating?
What is intuitive eating? It is the method of making you the expert of your body and its hunger signs. It’s how we can begin believing and encouraging healthy approaches towards eating and body image.
How Does This Work?
The fundamental belief is to eat when you feel hungry and finish when you are feeling full. The habit over here is to consume till your 80 per cent full.
Still, this intuition has dropped its charm over the decades as we have many distractions, emotional & mental stress, less information, and more of working on an autopilot mode.
So how do we go back to our roots and bring back this “feature” to encourages us to take a step towards a better lifestyle?
Types of Hunger
Physical Hunger:
This is our natural urge to restore our nutrients and our energy. Hunger has many signs such as irritability, mood swings, fatigue, and a growling stomach, which all falls when we eat and feel satisfied.
Emotional Hunger:
This is where the problem occurs as we connect our emotions and feeling with food, which produces cravings and ends up in us, reaching out for convenience foods. We then promote hatred towards ourselves and the food itself.
Principles of Intuitive Eating
Reject the Diet Mentality
Eliminate the stigma around the word “diet” We usually follow quick fixes and end up destroying our body’s hunger signs and way to see how we should ideally be eating. Diet is what changes your body and not what others do. It is what you see yourself developing in your system during your life.
Respect Your Hunger
In the same way, when our body gives the hunger signals, we need to make sure that we feel it quickly, as when we delay our hunger, we tend to eat or binge eat, which leads to all our other health issues. Hunger is not your enemy so treat it with honour, and you will notice your body bloom.
Making Peace With Food
Stop having a fight about whether you should be having a particular food or not. Know that no one food induces weight gain/weight loss. It is your complete lifestyle that influences your body. So stop having a battle with food and make peace with it.
Break the Boundaries That Are Built Around Food
No food is good or bad. Stop naming them or yourself for making personal choices. Challenge yourself and your ideas about food and break those barriers.
Bring Awareness to Your Feelings of Fullness.
As we discussed above on how we should respect our hunger, we also need to respect our fullness. It would be best if you ate until you are comfortable with how you feel and not until you feel bloated and feel that the food is till your throat.
Make Your Eating Time Pleasurable.
Appreciate your food, chew slowly, and sit down to have. This makes a lot of difference in how properly your food is digested and how your brain perceives food’s satisfying feeling.
Emotional Eating Is a Big No-no.
Emotional eating is a method of dealing with your emotions. Find options to deal with emotions that are not associated with food, like meditating, painting, taking a walk, talking to an old friend, learning new things, and journaling—intuitive eating benefits with drawing a line between physical and emotional hunger.
Stop Body-shaming Yourself
Don’t criticize and compare. Negative self-talk only leads to more stress, leading to an increase in weight and emotional eating. Just know that you are gorgeous, and if you do have health issues, start doing something about it and make it your preference.
Exercise
Physical exercise is as essential as the food we eat. You were moving your body benefits in releasing endorphins which results in a happy mood. Find an activity that you like to shift the focus from the numbers and aid you feel energized and healthy.
Also Read: Best Exercises for Weight Loss
