What Are The Principles of Intuitive Eating?

What Are The Principles of Intuitive Eating?

Have you heard of intuitive eating? Intuitive eating is not a diet, it promotes healthy eating habits, healthy relationships with food, and better body image.

Intuitive eating teaches you to touch base with your internal cues rather than the external diet rules you would have learned to try to control your eating habits and weight.

The 10 principles of intuitive eating were written by the ‘Intuitive Eating Pros’ Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch. These principles, as they have written in their books, are outlined below.

Reject The Diet Mentality

The first principle is about letting go and unlearning everything about dieting. While many diets have failed, you might still be believing that you just haven’t found the one that will work for you. Let this belief go.

The diet culture can make you feel bad about eating the food that you want and promise you quick weight loss. Reject this diet mentality and free yourself from guilt and feelings of failure.

Honor Your Hunger

The diet culture teaches you to ignore your hunger cues, but your hunger is the prime biological signal that tells you to eat because your body needs energy.

Intuitive eating is about eating when you are hungry and figuring out what food your body wants. You need to feed your body adequately so that it can function better. Otherwise, you’ll overeat and choose food impulsively.

Make Peace With Food

With the system of dieting, there are lots of foods that you are made to believe you should avoid at all costs if you want to lose weight. However, the principle of intuitive eating is that you should allow yourself to eat whatever you enjoy eating.

This practice helps you avoid uncontrollable cravings and eating ‘forbidden’ food excessively because you don’t know when you may get a chance to eat it again. Now is the time to make peace with food favorites and know that you can have them whenever your body sends the cues.

Challenge The Food Police – The Internal and External Voices

The voices in your head, let’s refer to them as the ‘food police’ are telling you that you are ‘bad’ for eating that bar of chocolate or for getting an extra bowl of ice cream. The food police can also be an external factor such as your partner or friend. Perhaps they are telling you that you shouldn’t be eating that.

Intuitive eating is letting go of both your internal judgment that you are bad or good based on the food that you eat, and ignoring comments from others. Instead, you should engage in more positive self-talk and focus on self-care instead of punishing yourself.

Discover The Satisfaction Factor

You have the right to enjoy the food that you eat. Intuitive eating teaches you to choose pleasure food consciously. When you do that, you can avoid bingeing and overeating. When you eat mindfully, you can notice when you have eaten enough and are satisfied and make the conscious effort to stop eating.

Feel Your Fullness

By noticing your body’s signals, you will feel it telling you to stop eating because you are full. It’s when you have eaten adequately but you are not uncomfortably full. Recognizing your feelings of fullness helps you to stop pressuring yourself to “clean your plate,” a practice you have most likely been taught as a child.

Cope With Your Emotions

Yes, you can use food to cope with your emotions, and emotional eating is okay up to a certain point. Intuitive eating teaches you that you should be able to tell whether you’re physically hungry or emotionally hungry. You shouldn’t use food as your only coping mechanism because it won’t help you address the real cause of your emotional distress. Instead, you should eat when you need to, not just because you want to.

Respect Your Body

Intuitive eating focuses on behavior rather than what your weighing scale shows. Everyone’s body is different and there is no telling what weight you are supposed to maintain. Instead, you should treat your body with respect, feed it adequately, move it, get enough sleep, and manage your stress. All these can lead to a healthy body size that’s right for you.

Move Your Body and Feel The Difference

The diet culture might have forced you to exercise excessively or dread it because it has become a chore. Intuitive eating is about moving your body not because you want to lose weight but because the movement makes you feel good. You don’t have to force yourself to run every day if your body enjoys walking. So, intuitive eating teaches you to move your body for fun, not punishment.

Honor Your Health With Gentle Nutrition

While intuitive eating teaches you to unlearn everything about the diet culture, there is one thing you shouldn’t forget - nutrition. It’s about using food science to help you choose the foods that will satisfy your needs.

In Summary

As you can see intuitive eating is not about losing weight. It’s about getting in touch with your internal cues, allowing you to develop healthier eating habits and better relationships with food. When you touch base with how you are wired to eat, you can develop a healthy body image, and improve your well-being.