Guide To Intuitive Eating

Intuitive Eating is a concept that is intended to help individuals create healthy relationships between food, mind, body and health. In practice, it may sound simplistic. However, the basic tenets are often overlooked. Significant problems with relationship to food, maladaptive coping with weight fluctuation, eating disorders, shame/guilt about one's appearance, and general dissatisfaction can occur when intuitive eating is not a principle of everyday life.

The basic premise of Intuitive Eating is to pay attention to your body's hunger cues, rather than focusing on caloric intake or to count grams of carbohydrates, fat or protein. In many ways the basic principles of Intuitive Eating are the direct opposite of dieting which. Intuitive Eating involves learning the distinction between true physical hunger cues and emotional cues, the latter of which drive compulsive eating behaviors such as overeating, binge eating, and choosing unhealthy foods. This process involves making amends with your own beliefs about food, including what food you label as "bad" or "fatty."

Some tips for incorporating Intuitive Eating into your life:

1. Rid the notion that you have to eat at set times with set portions.

2. Think of hunger much like a gas tank, with extremes of Empty and Full. Consider Empty to be a score of 0 and Full to be a score of 10. The goal is to keep your level of satiety between a 3 and 7 at all times, to ensure that you are never completely empty nor completely stuffed.

3. Address when you are eating to cope with stress, pain, sadness, anxiety, or any other emotional reason. Examine if there are other coping skills to address these emotions rather than food.

4. Spend some time exploring your own food beliefs, specifically which labels you give to certain foods that lead to rigid eating behaviors.

5. Stop counting calories, carbohydrates, fat grams etc. Pay attention to your own bodily cues for hunger. Do you notice hunger pangs in your stomach, a drop in energy, or increased irritability when you are hungry?