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.