By: Cheryl Garza
Bryan, Ohio
What is intuitive eating? Learning to listen and eat only to fulfill your hunger and nourish your body.
Intuitive eating seeks to acknowledge that years of diet culture and internalized fat phobia have created disordered eating and many people regardless of their size.
Losing weight and changing your changing your body rather than being healthy is usually the goal. Meeting an impossible, arbitrary standard of societal beauty has badly damaged our relationship with food.
Even people who go to the gym every day, count their calories, and do everything right often struggle with disordered eating and obsession with food.
Intuitive Eating, on the other hand, ask us to step back and recognize that food is morally neutral. Because we carry shame about eating “unhealthy” food, we overcompensate and restrict ourselves to make up for when we “fail”.
A negative cycle of restriction and overindulgence begins. What if we just enjoy your food, listen to our bodies, and stop eating when we meet our hunger cues?
Intuitive Eating tries to help you reset your eating habits and relationship with food, first through forgiveness and acceptance of yourself, and then through developing a heightened ability to recognize your body’s needs.
Some principles of Intuitive Eating: reject the diet mentality. Diets lead to disordered eating and exist solely as a capitalist tool designed to make money. Research shows that 95% of people who lose weight while dieting will regain it within five years.
That is called weight cycling and then increases the risk of disease more than staying at a steady but higher weight. Give up the idea that you have to be skinny to be healthy and ditch the diets.
Honor your Hunger. If you want to avoid overeating, it is crucial to listen to your body hunger cues. Your principal biological need for food will eventually overtake your self-control, so respect that you need to eat regularly.
Make peace with food. If you feel guilty for eating a cinnamon roll, challenge that guilt. Removing Shame from eating frees you to honor your cravings in a healthier way.
Feel your fullness. Listen to your body. If you feel full or the food isn’t tasting as good anymore, stopping question why are you still eating.
What emotional reaction is happening? Analyze your feelings. Start listening to the feelings leading you to eat certain foods are quantities. How are you feeling bored? Lonely? Ashamed?
Honor the validity of those emotions. Respect your body. It has helped you get through every challenge. Maybe it’s Time to love your body for what it has provided, rather than feeling a shame it isn’t perfect.
Make gentle nutrition choices. Rather than setting goals to be 100% perfect, listen to your body and consider what sounds good when you get those hunger cues. Think through all your options and favor the healthier ones if they fulfill you both emotionally and physically.
You may find you’re craving a bowl of steamed vegetables with chicken and rice more often than you would think. I am still working on repairing my relationship with food.
Since I have started analyzing my emotions as I eat, I have found some answers. When I Pause, Give Thanks and Truly BLESS my food before I eat it, I feel fulfilled and nourished at the highest level.
Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.. My deepest and greatest wish for us all is to awaken our highest self within. My greatest hopes and prayers are that we can all share and encourage each other to live a happier, healthier, vibrant life.
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I am putting together a community resource guide. Power, strength, unity, and connection. Please contact me if interested, as always, Be Well and Stay nourished! Cheryl L Garza, A Lady With A Lot of Zeal and yearning to empower, guide, encourage, and share all HOLISTIC Wholesome Living with youth-adults. Highly educated, extremely passionate, determined, and driven with no doubts… I choose to make the rest of my life the BEST of my Life, I wish that for all as well… Sharing Love & Kindness… spreadingwellness@ yahoo.com 567-239-1960
