Coming Home to Your Body Through Intuitive Eating
“Really? There’s another way for me to live?”
This is often the response we hear from our clients when we dive into our work together. There can be an immense feeling of relief in giving our clients permission to let go of all of the years of dieting, food rules and restriction.
As much as there can be feelings of relief, it also comes with feelings of fear, uncertainty and overwhelm. Imagine having something you’ve believed your whole life be questioned, and further, to realize how much harm it’s caused throughout your life. In our practice we create space for all the feelings that come with moving away from this well-known path of dieting and restriction.
We are all born intuitive eaters. Babies readily communicate when they are hungry and when they’ve had enough to eat. However, as soon as we are old enough to understand and communicate, we begin taking in messages from diet culture. Over time, instead of turning inward, we begin turning outward to get our needs met. Enter diet culture.
Christy Harrison (an anti-diet registered dietitian nutritionist, certified intuitive eating counsellor, and author of the book Anti-Diet) defines diet culture as a system of beliefs that:
Worships thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue
Promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status
Demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others
Oppresses people who don’t match up with it’s supposed picture of “health”
Diet culture teaches you that your body can’t be trusted, and that you need to rely on external factors to get your needs met---things like calorie tracking, measuring and meal plans.
You can learn to trust your body again through eating intuitively. Intuitive Eating is a framework that helps adults come home to their bodies again. Your body has innate wisdom, and deserves to be trusted.
Evelyn Tribole, co-author of Intuitive Eating, describes it as “the personal process of listening to the direct messages of your body in order to get your physical and psychological needs met.”
Principles of Intuitive Eating
Principle #1: Reject the Diet Mentality
Once we learn and understand what diet culture is, we see that it’s deeply intertwined in all aspects of our lives. Opting out of diet culture is an essential step needed to begin to trust your body again. If our clients are feeling tempted to start another diet, the two main things we ask them to reflect on are: for how long, and at what cost? Diet culture leaves you feeling like a failure, when really, the system has failed you. Simply put, weight loss is not sustainable for most people. Despite causing harm to our physical, psychological and emotional health, diets don’t ever come with a warning label.
Principle #2: Honour Your Hunger
You are born with the innate ability to identify and respond to your hunger cues in order to get your needs met. Dieting and restriction encourages you to ignore what your body is communicating, sometimes to the point that you lose the ability to identify hunger. Intuitive Eating helps you become in tune with and honour your hunger cues again. Hunger shows up in many different ways, including things like: low energy, headaches, feeling irritable, a grumbling tummy.
Principle #3: Make Peace with Food
This principle is all about giving yourself unconditional permission to eat. This is an essential step in healing your relationship with food. Food has no moral value – there are no good or bad foods. Allowing yourself to eat all foods can feel scary after years of food rules, and we often hear “but if I allow myself, I will never stop”. Making peace with food is the only path that allows you reach a place of food neutrality where you know that you can have something if you want it. Your worth is separate from your food choices.
Principle #4: Challenge the Food Police
The food police could be a friend, family member or your own inner critic. Get critical of where your beliefs around food have come from and how they are affecting you. Are foods still being labelled as “good” or “bad”, “healthy” or “unhealthy”? Replace judgment and punishment around your food choices with curiosity and compassion. Set boundaries with family and friends if they are playing the role of the food police. What’s on your plate isn’t up for discussion.
Principle #5: Discover the Satisfaction Factor
Seeking satisfaction from food is inherent as humans, but diet culture interferes with our ability to connect with this aspect of the eating experience. Reclaim satisfaction in your food relationship by replacing “I should eat” with “what sounds good?”. Do you really know what foods you enjoy when your mind isn’t filled with food rules? Seeking satisfaction from food allows us to embrace a really important part of the human experience – joy, pleasure and connection.
Principle #6: Feel Your Fullness
With this principle, it’s helpful to acknowledge that seeking satisfaction from food is connected to honouring our fullness. You deserve to feel full and satisfied after eating a meal or snack. Giving yourself unconditional permission to eat gives you access to a wide variety of foods that provide satisfaction. Feeling your fullness allows you to honour your needs – sometimes this looks like going back for more, and sometimes this looks like leaving food on your plate.
Principle #7: Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness
First and foremost, we need to remove the shame that comes with using food to cope. Often times, when people identify as “emotional eaters”, there is usually physical or mental restriction that is contributing to the pattern of reaching for food. You deserve to meet your needs by giving your body enough food. Creating a toolbox of coping mechanisms helps you reach for what you need to cope: things like meditation, journaling, relaxing and enjoying food in a way that is satisfying.
Principle #8: Respect Your Body
Having respect for your body is deeply connected to opting out of diet culture. How can you respect your body if you are engaging in behaviours that are rooted in changing it? It’s normal to have days that you feel good in your body and days that you don’t. The key is knowing that your body is deserving of respect, care and nourishment, regardless of how you are feeling in your body. Your worth is inherent and isn’t tied to what your body looks like. You are so much more than a body.
Principle #9: Movement – Feel The Difference
Often times, our relationship with movement is another area that needs healing. You deserve to move your body in ways that feel good, rather than moving your body as punishment. If you feel like you view it as punishment, taking a break from movement can create space to assess and heal our relationship with it, and shift into forms of movement that feel good, and most importantly, that bring you joy.
Principle #10: Honour Your Health – Gentle Nutrition
Diet culture demonizes certain ways of eating and elevates others, when in reality, no one food can make or break our health. Gentle nutrition can be: having variety in your food choices, having a loose structure around meals and snacks, having flexibility in your schedule, and ensuring that you are satisfied from your food choices.
Give yourself space to get curious. Notice what comes up for you when you think about your own journey with food and your body. If your inner critic tries to tell you that this path sounds great for everyone but you, we are here to remind you that you deserve to feel at peace with food and feel at home in your body.
