Is Intuitive Eating For You?
Intuitive Eating Isn’t ‘Following Your Excitement.’
It’s messy, frustrating, hard and often painful. Am I selling it? I say this because I see an assumption ‘out there’ that Intuitive eating is the easy option because it’s unstructured. It’s trending at the moment, donuts splashed over newsfeeds with #intuituveeating.
Intuitive eating doesn’t mean eating what you want when you want it. Here is what it does mean:
Looking consciously at deeply ingrained patterns of behaviour around food
Getting conscious with food, slowing down, getting rid of distractions
Checking into actual hunger levels : this is harder than you would think. That internal little baby just wants to self soothe with food and watch out anyone who tries to take it away!
Looking at dysfunctional relationship to food through the familial lens. Most of us develop our patterns early. Changing these can be difficult and often bring up a lot of subconscious emotion.
Food is psychological and emotional, it is one of our deepest primal instincts. We develop our identities around it. Challenging the identity is no picnic.
Connecting with your body in such a deep way that you allow it to regulate you. This is interoceptive work. It’s probably why it’s the attractive choice for yogis. It’s a slow, feeling in process and sometimes hella confusing.
It’s about developing a trusting relationship with your instincts around food and working with a variety of tools to help you do it.
It’s basically food psychotherapy.
Yea so it’s not about eating donuts simply because you want them, it’s more about investigating the ‘want’ and investigating reactionary responses. I personally feel getting a basic understanding of nutrition before applying an intuitive approach is extremely important because knowledge is power and you’re making choices from a whole variety of places including your intellect. That’s why I teach nutrition basics and blend in the intuitive approach. I mix tracking with intuitive eating so that my clients have a variety of places to approach their food from. Learning to eat intuitively is an amazing process but it’s not the easy choice because it’s unstructured. Quite the opposite.
