The Key To Stop Dieting For Good
Intuitive Eating is a self-care eating style that encourages a healthy attitude toward food and body image. Eating should be an intuitive process, but it isn’t for many people. Trusting so-called experts about what, when, and how much to eat steers you away from trusting your body’s internal signals. Unlike conventional diets, Intuitive Eating has no rigid rules. Instead, it offers guidelines that help you relearn how to trust and honour your body’s signals. Learning to become an Intuitive Eater can help you stop dieting for good.
Intuitive eating was conceived in 1995 by two dieticians, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch. More than 125 studies to date have validated this evidence based approach to eating. If you’d like to read some of the studies published on Intuitive Eating, please refer to this list.
There are 10 principles or guidelines in Intuitive Eating that help you reconnect to your body’s internal signals and remove the obstacles to attuning to these signals. For instance, food rules, thoughts, or beliefs about food or your body, are all obstacles to attuning to your body’s signals.
These are the ten principles of Intuitive Eating:
- Reject the Diet Mentality. Diet mentality is a false hope that a particular diet will help you lose weight quickly, easily, and permanently.
- Honour Your Hunger. Respond to your early indications of hunger by feeding your body adequately. Ignoring your hunger signals and letting yourself get too hungry often leads to binge eating.
- Make Peace with Food. Let go of food rules and feel confident eating any food without feeling guilt or loss of control.
- Challenge the Food Police. Challenge the thoughts that lead you to believe certain foods are good or bad.
- Respect Your Fullness. Practice checking in during eating to see how the food tastes and monitor your level of hunger.
- Discover the Satisfaction Factor. Avoiding distractions, eating in a pleasing environment and eating food that tastes good makes eating more satisfying and pleasurable.
- Cope With Your Emotions With Kindness. Emotional eating can be a way some people cope with or numb their emotions. Finding ways unrelated to food to cope with uncomfortable feelings helps you avoid emotional eating and meet your real emotional needs.
- Respect Your Body. Make peace with your body, learn to respect it for its capabilities and build a better body image.
- Movement, Feel the Difference. Find ways to move your body that make you feel good, energized and alive.
- Honour Your Health with Gentle Nutrition. Foods you eat should taste good, nourish you, and make you feel good.
