What is Intuitive Eating?
Intuitive Eating As a Path to Peace With Food and Eating
Intuitive eating is an approach to eating and weight management that is based on becoming more attuned to the body's natural signals of hunger and fullness. Rather than keeping track of portions, or calories, or carbs, intuitive eaters know the exact amount of food they need because they know how to listen to, and successfully use their internal signals.
Intuitive eating, which is also knows as attuned eating, mindful eating, normal eating, wisdom eating, conscious eating and nondieting, is intended to create a healthy relationship with food, mind and body, and is a popular treatment for disordered eating and eating disorders.
What is Intuitive Eating Like?
Think back to a time when you:
didn't count calories, carbohydrate or fat grams or worry about correct portion sizes?
ate when you felt hungry and easily stopped eating when you were satisfied?
coped with difficult issues and feelings without using food?
felt comfortable in your own skin?
played and moved for fun instead of exercised to lose weight?
That is intuitive eating and a life free from eating struggles!
Intuitive Eating Can Help
If you are afraid to eat, or if you eat too much or if you feel food has taken up too much time and space in your life, intuitive eating can help. You will free yourself from meal plans, diet programs, and other eating formulas.
You will be able to eat without the external controls that society says are so necessary (portion control, good food/bad food lists, etc).
As an intuitive eater, you will let go of disordered eating behaviors including emotional eating, restricting, binging, purging, obsessing, and "food addictions."
You will eat healthfully while using your natural ability to eat when hungry and quit when satisfied.
The term intuitive eating was coined by Eveyln Tribole and Elyse Resch in their book Intuitive Eating in 1995. (A book I highly recommend.)
At that time, I was writing my book, Moving Away From Diets, which was published in 1996. We called this internally-regulated eating by the term "physically-connected eating," a term which clearly did not catch on!
Intuitive eating requires a complete break from the belief that we need some find of plan or formula to be successful at eating and weight management.
It is not easy to do, because it is so vitally different from how we are brought up eating, but it is well worth the effort.
I know, I had to learn intuitive eating to heal from my eating problems back in the 80s when there was little written about it.
I had to piece together what I could by reading books like Breaking Free from Emotional Eating and Diet's Don't Work, which has been re-released as Diet's Still Don't Work.
Today you have so many more resources. You can read books such as Intuitive Eating, and Breaking Free from Emotional Eating. You can also download free, the Hunger Fullness Scale and Hunger Fullness Scale Journal.
Feel free to give us a call to see if intuitive eating would work for you.
