What is Intuitive Eating?

If it wasn’t for diet culture, intuitive eating would just be eating.

It is for everyone! It’s especially useful for someone that has been dieting for a long time and is struggling with disordered eating. But it also works for someone that is confused by the conflicting messages of diet culture, or someone that wants to protect their kids from going down the dieting path.

❌”It’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle”❌ is just another way of dieting!

All of this is not normal:

Counting calories.
Logging everything you eat into an app.
Only feeling “good” if you eat “clean” foods.
Intermittent fasting by ignoring your hunger.
Demonizing any foods like ‘carbs’ or ‘sugar’.
Having to know the macronutrient content of food before eating them.
Having cheat days.
Working out to offset eating too much.
Dressing and sauce on the side to avoid the extra calories.
Thoughts about food consume so much of your time, attention and energy.

So what would normal eating look like?

Starting a meal hungry and eating until satisfied.
Eating when you’re not hungry because you won’t have time to eat later.
Choosing food you enjoy, and eating it until you get enough of it.
Choosing food that is nutritious but also delicious.
Giving yourself permission to eat for emotional reasons sometimes.
Taking just a few bites of dessert because you know you can have some later, or eating it all because it’s so delicious.
It can be 3 meals a day with 2 snacks, or 2 meals and 1 snack.
It’s overeating and feeling stuffed.
Under-eating and wishing you had more.
Thoughts about food are just as important as other areas of your life.

Intuitive Eating is…

Feeding your body with foods based on your internal wisdom, irrelevant of outside influences.

Listening to your body and giving it what it needs.

Relearning how to eat with peace and permission and to rediscover the joy and pleasure of eating while enhancing your well-being and health.

It’s difficult to listen to your body if the outside influences and “noise” are too loud. We need to quieten those voices in order to listen to our innate wisdom.

Evelyn Tribole, co-author of the book Intuitive Eating, says “IE is a personal process of honoring health by listening and responding to the direct messages of the body in order to meet physical and psychological needs.”

In the book, there are 10 principles that we will cover during the Food Freedom course. They are NOT RULES. And there is no right or wrong, black or white with Intuitive Eating. Everyone will be different as everybody has different needs, likes and dislikes.

You may be wondering if you can lose weight with Intuitive Eating…that’s also discussed in the Food Freedom course.

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