Intuitive Eating Guide
This guide outlines the principles of Intuitive Eating, a dietary approach that encourages a healthy relationship with food and body image. It aims to teach individuals to listen to their bodies, eat mindfully, and reject traditional diet mentality.
Step 1: Reject Diets
Begin by discarding the diet mentality. Stop looking for a quick fix and acknowledge that dieting can lead to a cycle of weight loss and gain, and isn't conducive to long-term health.
Step 2: Honor Hunger
Learn to recognize and honor your biological hunger signals. Eat when you're hungry and stop when you're comfortably full to rebuild trust with your body and its hunger cues.
Step 3: Make Peace
Make peace with food by giving yourself unconditional permission to eat. This will help to alleviate feelings of guilt or anxiety surrounding eating.
Step 4: Challenge Food Police
Silence the internal 'food police' that label foods as 'good' or 'bad.' This allows for a more neutral and balanced approach to eating.
Step 5: Respect Fullness
Eat slowly and mindfully, paying attention to the signs of fullness from your body. Respect those signs and stop eating once you feel satiated.
Step 6: Discover Satisfaction
Focus on the pleasure and satisfaction that eating can provide. By doing so, you may find that it takes less food to decide you've had 'enough.'
Step 7: Cope with Emotions
Find ways to cope with emotions without using food. Emotional eating can interfere with intuitiveness; seek other methods for comfort, stress relief, and emotional processing.
Step 8: Respect Body
Learn to respect your body, recognizing that everyone is naturally different, which includes size and shape. Self-acceptance can significantly improve your relationship with food.
Step 9: Exercise Feel
Shift the focus from exercising to lose weight to how it feels to move your body. Choose enjoyable ways of being active that help you feel strong and alive.
Step 10: Honor Health
Opt for nutritious food that you also enjoy and that makes you feel well. It's about balance and choosing foods that honor both your health and your taste buds.
General Notes
Flexibility
Remember, Intuitive Eating is flexible and personal. There is no 'one-size-fits-all' approach, so adapt these principles to fit your lifestyle and needs.
Patience
Developing an intuitive eating approach takes time and practice. Be patient with yourself as you unlearn dieting habits and learn to eat intuitively.
Support System
Consider building a support system with friends, online communities, or a registered dietitian who is familiar with Intuitive Eating to help guide and support you in this journey.