By Marcela Barillas (nutritionist)
“Intuitive eating” is an evidence-based, self-care eating framework that integrates instinct, emotion, and rational thinking. It was created by two nutritionists, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, in 1995. It is not just about eating when you’re hungry and stopping when you’re full. It is a personal and dynamic process that includes these 10 principles:
- Reject the diet mentality
Throw away diet books and magazine articles that offer false hope of quick, easy, and permanent weight loss.
- Honor your hunger
Keep your body biologically fueled with the adequate calories and carbohydrates. Otherwise, you may trigger a primal urge to overeat.
- Make peace with food
Allow yourself to eat unconditionally. If you tell yourself that you cannot or should not eat a particular food, you may experience an intense feeling of deprivation that turns into uncontrollable cravings and, often, binge eating.
- Challenge the food police
The food police monitor the irrational rules created by diet culture. Keep the thoughts out of your head that declare you are “good” for eating few calories or “bad” because you ate a slice of chocolate cake.
- Respect your satiety
Listen to the body signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry. Observe the signs that tell you that you are comfortably full. Pause while eating and ask yourself what the food tastes like and what your current level of hunger is.
- Discover the satisfaction factor
In our compulsive quest to comply with diet culture, we often overlook one of life’s most basic gifts: the pleasure and satisfaction that can be found in the experience of eating. When you eat what you really crave, in an inviting environment, you will find that just the right amount of food is enough to decide that you have had “enough”.
- Honor your feelings without using food
Anxiety, loneliness, boredom, and anger are emotions that we all experience throughout life. Food may comfort you in the short term or distract you from pain, but it won’t fix any of these feelings. Find kind ways to nourish yourself, distract yourself, and solve your problems.
- Respect your body
All bodies deserve dignity. It is hard to reject the diet mentality if you are unrealistic and overly critical of your body size or shape.
- Exercise: feel the difference
Get active and feel the difference. Focus on how you feel when you move your body, rather than the calories burned during exercise.
- Honor your health with compassionate nutrition
Choose foods that respect your health and taste buds and make you feel good. Remember that you don’t have to eat perfectly to be healthy. What matters is what you consistently eat over time. It is progress that counts, not perfection.
Intuitive eating involves trusting the body’s inner wisdom to make decisions about foods that make you feel good, without judgment and without the influence of diet culture. We are all born with the ability to eat, stop when we are full, eat when we are hungry, and consume foods that satisfy us. Many of us lose that freedom, and intuitive eating is about learning to regain it.
Source: Esto es azúcar