What is Intuitive Eating?
Intuitive eating is a philosophy of eating that makes you the expert of your body and its hunger signals.
It is the opposite of a diet, because it doesn’t have specific food guidelines or tell you when to eat.
Intuitive Eating is a method of you learning your body’s internal cues and learning to listen and trust those cues to lead to your healthiest life. It helps you to free yourself from chronic dieting and restrictive eating practices and actually learn how to make peace with food and your body.
Can Intuitive Eating help you lose weight?
Dieting is a massive multi-billion dollar industry. But it doesn’t actually show sustained weight loss for the long term. Various studies show:
40% of dieters gain back the weight they have lost within 3 years
Only 19% of people are able to maintain just 10% weight loss for 5 years
5 years after a group women finished a weight loss program actually gained up to 8 lbs more than when they had started the weight loss program.
Obesity has reached epidemic proportions and the US alone has over 35% of the population that is obese. Sadly, one study showed that 90% of mothers have dieted recently and another study showed that 5 year old daughters of dieting mothers are twice as likely to think about starting dieting too, compared to the daughters of mothers that have not dieted.
So how do we combat this cycle of chronic dieting and weight gain?
I believe that Intuitive Eating is the way.
The purpose of Intuitive Eating is actually not for weight loss. It is to help you build a healthier relationship with food and your body. It's a tool to help you learn how to nourish your body, honor your emotions and rewire your brain’s thought processes about dieting, food and your body. Intuitive Eating is about encouraging lifestyle changes and self care in order to see long term health.
Based upon my own experiences with Intuitive Eating, I have found that weight loss can be a potential result from listening to your body’s hunger and fullness cues. During my 30 Day Intuitive Gut Healing Journey, listening to my body’s hunger and fullness cues was an integral factor. As a result, I lost over 4 lbs and 7.5 inches in total was lost over my whole body.
In addition to my own experience with Intuitive Eating, studies have shown that Intuitive Eaters tend to be less preoccupied with food, have less emotional or disordered eating, improved body image, a lower BMI (a calculation of the body mass divided by the square of the body height, in kg/m2), they don’t wait too long before eating, have better blood sugar levels, and have improved energy levels. All of these factors affect weight changes.
Why is listening to your hunger and fullness cues so important?
First of all, hunger is not the enemy. We are supposed to feel hungry at times and full at other times. The key is understanding when your body is feeling these things as opposed to when you are being influenced to feel these things because of external factors like friends, family, media etc. Dieting often makes us think that being hungry is wrong, and it simply is not. It is a fact of life and something we can all learn to embrace and learn from.
We often disassociate from our hunger and fullness cues when we are trying to “diet”. And instead it is easy to fall into negative spirals of binging and starvation, thinking that losing weight is equivalent to being healthy. In some cases, yes losing weight can help individuals become healthier, but sometimes this can degrade into a toxic cycle of body image and destructive food relationships.
Does Intuitive Eating help with Emotional Eating?
Yes! Intuitive eating helps you determine if your hunger comes from emotional reasons or if your body needs fuel from a physiological sense.
Emotional eating is something we all have experienced, either in a positive or negative sense. If you’ve celebrated birthdays with cake and cookies, or if you’ve consoled yourself with a pint of ice cream after a particularly horrible day, these are all examples of both positive and negative emotional eating.
What Intuitive Eating does is it helps you figure out if your body is truly hungry or if you are using food as a coping, consoling or comforting mechanism.
This process is all about becoming aware.
Awareness is the key for anything that we want to change in our lives.
Intuitive eating encourages you to embrace radical honesty about your emotions and how you process the full array of human emotions that we experience. Once you have the mental awareness of your emotions and hunger/fullness cues, you are equipped to make food choices with even more knowledge about yourself. This typically leads to making more nutritious, wholesome choices with food, and finding healthier ways to deal with any negative emotions that occur in your day-to-day.
So how do you get started with Intuitive Eating? Stay tuned for my 3 steps on how to get started with Intuitive Eating in my next blog post! Or schedule your FREE 20 minute nutrition consultation with me here!
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