Intuitive Eating
Living with the “diet mentality”…
“I was so bad today. I had a cheeseburger.”
“I was so good today. I had a salad for lunch.”
“I’ve already ‘blown it’ for today. I’m just going to start again tomorrow.”
“Next year it will be different.”
These are just some of the tortured thoughts of someone living with the “diet mentality.”
Let’s talk anti-diets…
Intuitive Eating shuts all of those thoughts down, because it’s the first and only sane approach to eating…
… that doesn’t require a diet or restriction. In fact, it’s ANTI-DIET (are you rejoicing yet?).
Life is not meant to be weighed and measured… and neither is eating. Founded by nutrition experts Elyse Resch and Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating is a breakthrough concept and book, because it focuses on the importance of listening to your instincts, your hunger, and your fullness.
It actually reminds us of the importance that food be pleasurable and satisfying.
Pleasure without guilt or restriction…
Intuitive Eating is a powerhouse of change. With 10 guiding principles developed by The Original Eating Pros®, intuitive eaters learn a new language and a new way of eating:
- Reject the Diet Mentality: Throw out the diet books and magazine articles that offer you false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently.
- Honor Your Hunger: Keep your body biologically fed with adequate energy and carbohydrates. Otherwise you can trigger a primal drive to overeat.
- Make Peace with Food: Call a truce; stop the food fight! Give yourself unconditional permission to eat.
- Challenge the Food Police: Scream a loud “NO” to thoughts in your head that declare you’re “good” for eating minimal calories or “bad,” because you ate a piece of chocolate cake. The Food Police monitor the unreasonable rules that dieting has created.
- Respect Your Fullness: Listen for the body signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry. Observe the signs that show that you’re comfortably full.
- Discover the Satisfaction Factor: The Japanese have the wisdom to promote pleasure as one of their goals of healthy living. In our fury to be thin and healthy, we often overlook one of the most basic gifts of existence – the pleasure and satisfaction that can be found in the eating experience.
- Honor Your Feelings Without Using Food: Find ways to comfort, nurture, distract, and resolve your issues without using food. Anxiety, loneliness, boredom, anger are emotions we all experience throughout life. Each has its own trigger, and each has its own appeasement. Food won’t fix any of these feelings.
- Respect Your Body: Accept your genetic blueprint. Just as a person with a shoe size of eight would not expect to realistically squeeze into a size six, it is equally as futile (and uncomfortable) to have the same expectation with body size. But mostly, respect your body, so you can feel better about who you are.
- Exercise – Feel the Difference: Forget militant exercise. Just get active and feel the difference. Shift your focus to how it feels to move your body, rather than the calorie-burning effect of exercise.
- Honor Your Health: Gentle Nutrition – Make food choices that honor your health and taste buds while making you feel well. Remember that you don’t have to eat a perfect diet to be healthy.
“Disordered eaters” versus an “eating disorder”…
I work with disordered eaters (but not those that struggle with eating disorders) who find themselves eating for emotional reasons instead of intuitive reasons… who are still plagued by stories about what their body “should look like” and what food they “should eat because it’s ‘healthy.’”
I’ll guide you in applying the 10 Intuitive Eating principles…
While reading the book alone can create a real change, clients sometimes get stuck on how to use the principles in real life; how to beat the mental blocks from too much dieting and self-shame; how to figure out what nonfood-related struggles are impacting their food choices.
This is where I come in. I’ll ask the questions that start putting the pieces together – what’s led you to your current food patterns; what’s holding you back from integrating new ones that set you up for food freedom. I’ll offer suggestions and ways to shift into those new, beneficial habits.
“Food is an important part of a balanced ‘diet.’” – Fran Lebowitz
It’s time to end your war with food… for good.
We will banish old, triggering words like “diet,” “fat” and “calorie counting.” We will start using words like “instincts,” “hunger” and “fullness.”
Patterns change when your mindset changes.
Call me to begin!