The 10 Principles Of Intuitive Eating

Intuitive Eating is a personal process of honoring health by listening and responding to the direct messages of your body in order to meet your physical and psychological needs.

Since it was first published in 1995, Intuitive Eating (by TRIBOLTE and RESH) has become the go-to book on rebuilding a healthy body image and making peace with food.

That is because Intuitive Eating is not a diet or food plan that you either follow or “blow it”. It also doesn’t include counting calories, carbs, points, or macros.

As a matter of fact, study after study shows that dieting and food restriction for the purpose of weight loss leads to more weight gain on the long term! In addition, the focus and preoccupation on weight leads to body dissatisfaction, which negatively impacts our health and our relationship with food.

If you are tired of endlessly trying new diets and feel like nothing is right for you, then it is time for you to liberate yourself from the diet culture and the weight obsession. Intuitive eating will empower you as it lets you tune in to your hunger, fullness and satisfaction signals.

Are your ready to change your life through the journey of self-discovery and food freedom? If yes, it all starts by knowing the 10 principles of intuitive eating:

The 1st principle of intuitive eating is to start by rejecting the diet mentality.

To get angry at all the fad diets that promise you to lose weight fast, and that have led you to feel like you failed every time you stopped them and gained back the weight.

If you still feel the need to try a new or strict diet OR you are not considering the process as a lifestyle shift, this will prevent you from being free and from discovering Intuitive eating.

The 2nd principle is to honor your hunger and keep your body biologically well fed with adequate carbohydrates and energy.

Otherwise, you will reach moments of excessive hunger with a primal drive to eat, and you will lose all the good intentions of conscious and cautious eating.

Learning to listen to this first biological signal helps in re-building trust with your body and with food.

The 3rd principle is to make peace with food and to give yourself unconditional permission to eat.

If you tell yourself that you shouldn’t have a particular food, this can lead to intense feelings of deprivation which leads to uncontrollable cravings and bingeing.

So, when you finally “give-in” to your forbidden food, eating will be experienced with intensity and usually results in overwhelming guilt.

The 4th principle is to challenge the food police and to ban those thoughts in your head that claim you’re “good” for eating a low amount of calories on one day and “bad” because you had a piece of cake on the other.

The food police monitor the rules dieting has created that are engraved in your brain and provoke feelings of guilt.

Chasing the food police away is a critical step in returning to intuitive eating.

The 5th principle of intuitive eating is to respect your fulness, to listen to the body signals that tell you are no longer hungry.

For that to happen, you need to observe the signs that show you are comfortably full, pause in the middle of a meal and ask yourself what is your current fullness level.

Ultimately, you will stop exactly when your body tells you to just like infants and babies who are in tune with their body’s fullness signal and stop accepting food from their parent.

The 6th principle is to discover the satisfaction factor.

For example, the Japanese culture promotes pleasure as one of their goals of healthy living. While we focus mainly on being thin or healthy, we forget that eating is an experience itself and one of the basic enjoyments of life.

When you eat what you want in an environment that is inviting, the pleasure will be a powerful force in helping you feel satisfied and content. You will find that it takes less food for you to feel full.

The 7th principle is to honor your feelings without using food.  Find ways to comfort, distract and resolve your issues without comfort food.

Anxiety, loneliness, boredom, anger etc. are emotions we all experience. Each of them has its own trigger and its own appeasement.

It is important to remember that food won’t fix anything. It may comfort on the short term and distract or numb from the pain, but it will not solve the main problem.

On the contrary, frequent emotional eating OR eating your emotions could make you feel worse in the long run since you will ultimately need to deal with the source of the emotion and with the discomfort of overeating.

The 8th principle is to respect your body. 

Since everybody is different, it is important to accept your genetic blueprint and your body so that you can feel better about who you are.

It is much better than to set unrealistic goals or being overly critical about your body shape.

The 9th principle of intuitive eating is to exercise and feel the difference while you do!

Instead of thinking that exercise should be done to burn calories, shift your focus on how it makes you feel to move your body and how energized you feel after a workout. 

When you do that, it helps you get out of bed for your morning brisk walk or it will motivate you to go to the gym after a long day at work. If your only goal is to lose weight, that is not a motivating factor at that moment in time.

The 10th principle of intuitive eating is to honor your health. 

For that, make food choices that honor your health and tastebuds at the same time.

And remember that you don’t have to eat a perfect diet in order to be healthy. You will not have a nutrient deficiency or gain weight from one snack or meal. What actually counts is how you consistently eat over time and the progress you make.

Reference: https://www.intuitiveeating.org/10-principles-of-intuitive-eating/

Stéphanie