Intuitive eating is all about a non-diet approach towards your food. It focuses on building health-boosting behaviors rather than focusing on the scale.
It considers building a better body image and having a stronger connection with your food. Intuitive eating helps you make guided choices and acknowledge your internal cues. These include how you feel around food, fullness, and satiation after the meals and your cravings.
To help you transition smoothly to intuitive eating as a beginner, here is our short guide:
1. It is not dieting
Intuiting eating is far from dieting, and you need to get rid of all those dieting jargon that promise quick weight loss. If you cannot rid your system of the belief in the dieting culture for weight loss, you will not discover intuitive eating freely.
2. Hunger Acknowledgement
When you first feel the hunger pangs, do not ignore your body’s needs. It deserves to have sufficient carbohydrates and energy, and you must feed it adequately. When you underfeed or tend to starve your body, you reach a primal hunger state and end up overeating on impulsive food choices. Stop this!
3. Social Media Detoxing
Stop allowing social media to glorify the thin and skinny physique of you. Thinness does not mean good health, but the idealized images have made this a perception.
You are better off without any source that promotes body dissatisfaction and a reed-thin figure.
4. Don’t Apply Moralistic Value on Food
Part of living in a diet culture is how we tend to give it moralistic value. We associate all food items with guiltlessness and thinness or good and evil. When you categorize food as bad, you start depriving yourself of it and trigger biological cravings.
Do you know what the biological cravings result in? Binge eating, and then you go on a diet after that, and the vicious cycle continues. It is best to stop using moralistic terms for describing your food. Instead, try to eat everything in moderate proportions.
5. Satisfaction factor
It would be best if you prioritized finding satisfaction from your food. When you’re eating, acknowledge the gift of existence and the bounty of nature before you. Be grateful for what you are eating and the abundance of food you enjoy. This will result in a high level of satisfaction and content after each means.
This will also help you discover just the right portion of food that brings this satiation level for you and the environment and setting you love to take your meals in.
6. Make the Exercises You Love
In intuitive eating, you also need to change the way you work out. Instead of pushing your body for rigorous routines that the trainers insist upon, move the way your body loves. It doesn’t matter if the exercise is high-intensity or low-intensity; work out the way your body loves and finds comfortable.
Final Thoughts
Intuitive eating is all about forgetting the rigid, wrongly glorified dieting principles and forbidding foods to maintain a zero size. It is about eating freely and with gratefulness, in a way that benefits your wellbeing.