Intuitive Eating - The Guide to a Healthy Relationship with Food

In this weeks blogpost I want to talk about a topic, which is pretty sensitive for most people. It is dieting and nutrition, but don't be afraid I wont be talking about the latest diet, which will help you to lose weight and be the healthiest human being possible. I am certainly not a nutrition expert, so I wont be giving advice on what to eat, I just want to walk you through the step by step process I went through to build a healthier relationship with what I am putting in my body. This way I am approaching food nowadays, is known as intuitive eating and it is not just me, who it practising intuitive eating. There is a whole community build arround it and it helped millions of people to make peace with food and even cured their eating disorder for many people.

If you would have asked me a month ago, whether I had a healthy relationship with food, my answer would have been yes. There were periods in my life where I didn't. I tried paleo for a year, where I was really strict on what I put in my mouth and even counted my calories for a while, in a period where I wanted to gain some weight. Looking back at those periods of time, I definitely didn't have a healthy relationship with food, but even one month ago, where I did not restrict my food intake and I did allow myself to eat anything I wanted, I do know now that I was still on a diet, after reading a book about intuitive eating. This is a problem many people are struggling with these days, especially after coming out of a strict diet. Sometimes this is obvious, for example if someone is still counting his calories, but many dieting habits are actually unconcscious and if you take a closer look at them, they are forms of dieting. Let me give you some examples and maybe you see yourself in some of them: Only eating at specific times of the day, forbidding yourself specific foods in order to stay "healthy", feeling guilty after eating certain "unhealthy" foods or avoiding carbs in the evening. These people often defend themselves, by saying it's not a diet, it's a lifestyle. This is total bullshit, counting macros and avoiding certain foods is not a lifestyle and as long as you don't get rid of this dieting mentality, you will never become an intuitive eater and build a healthy relationship with food.

Now I talked a lot about intuitive eating, but never really defined it. Intuitive eating is not a new diet, it is basically trusting your body on what to eat, when to eat and how much to eat. It is listening to your bodies hunger and satiety cues and giving yourself the permission to eat whatever your body needs and even craves in this very moment. In the following I want to walk you through the main steps to become an intuitive eater to ultimately build a healthier relationship with food.

1. Reject the Diet Mentality

You probably all heard of the yo-yo effect and it is scientifically proven that over 70% of the people starting a weight loss diet, end up with more weight than before. This is common knowledge, but there are probably millions of people out there in the world, who are starting a new diet right in this very moment. Diet rebound is not a lack of discipline, it is a simple biological reaction. Your body experiences the dieting as a form of starvation, metabolism slows down and food cravings escalte, which ulitmately results in a binge and putting the weight, you just lost, back on. This cycle is described by the Dieter's Dilemma. Dieting increases cravings and urges for food. The dieter gives in to the craving, overeats and eventually regains any lost weights. Once again the dieter has the desire to shrink their body and so another diet begins. In addition to simply not working, dieting actually has many negative side effects including retaining more fat when your start eating again, decrease in metabolism and increase in the risk of premature death and heart disease. When thinking about starting a new diet ask yourself the question, if dieting is the problem, how can it be part of the solution?

2. Honor your Hunger

In the modern world we lost the ability to listen to your hunger cues and instead base our food intake on external cues, for example specific times in the day, where we give ourselves the permission to eat. In reality our energy needs and levels flunctuate from day to day. A hunger signal is generated by the overall energy need of the cell. When cellular power is low, it will produce a signal that induces hunger. Being an intuitive eater includes listening to the physical hunger cues like a light belly rumbling and then fueling the body with the food it needs. By denying your true hunger, when it is not the right time yet, your strengthen food cravings and obsessions, which will ultimately lead to uncontrolled eating. On the other hand you should not eat, when you are not hungry. Only eating when you are actually physically hungry, makes the eating process more satisfying, because the food simply tastes better. So whenever you feel like eating, check in with your body and ask yourself if this is physical hunger or if you want eat because you are lonely or bored.

3. Make Peace with Food

Being an intuitive eater includes giving yourself the unconditional permission to eat the foods you really want to eat. Making peace with food means allowing all foods into your eating world instead of restricting yourself from foods, which are "unhealthy". By forbidding yourself to eat certain foods, you build up cravings, which get stronger over time and ultimately lead to eating larger quantities of that food. This is also called last supper eating. After you have eaten one bite of a certain "forbidden" food, you tell yourself now i fucked this up, now I will eat the whole cookie jar, because it is the last time I am ever going to eat a cookier ever again. This is a very toxic cycle and if you instead give yourself the ultimate permission to eat anything you want, it makes it much easier to just stop after eating one cookie, because you know you will always have access to this certain type of food. In order to get to this point you probably have to go through a food freeing phase, where you eat all the food, you've been restricting yourself in the past. During this process you will probably notice, that the foods you have been craving all those years, aren't even that good.

4. Feel your Fullness

Listen for the body signls that tell you that you are no longer hungry and observe the sings that show that you are comfortably full. In order to stop eating when you are comfortably full, you have to give yourself full permission to eat again when you are hungry. The feeling of being comfortably full and satisfied is great, being overstuffed can feel really uncomfortable on the other hand. It is often pretty hard to hit the right spot here, but a great tool is to stop in the middle of eating and check your satisfaction and satiety level. In order to properly do that, you need to get rid of distractions during the eating process. So stop being on your phone while eating, really taste your food and take your time to fully enjoy the experience.

5. Respect Your Body

As long as you are at war with your body, it will be difficult to be at peace with yourself and food. A key step in this process is to accept your genetics. Just as a person with a shoe size 49, would not expect to realistically squeeze into a 45, it is equally futile to have the same expectation about body size. You have to make yourself clear, that genetics do play a big role when it comes to your body size and you certainly cannot change that. Instead you should appreciate the body you have right now. Be realistic, if reaching a specific body goal means living on rice cakes and water, while exercising for hours, you should quit that expectation of yourself. Instead focus on your relationship with your body and how you can improve it by speaking kindly of yourself.

I hope I encouraged you to rethink the way you approach dieting and eating in generall and give intuitive eating a try. Keep in mind that this is a process, which needs time, especially if you come from years of strict dieting. We were all eating intuitively when we were children and in order to gain this healthy relationship with food back, we have to be kind to ourselves.

Cheers Emil