Intuitive Eating- 10 Principles and How to Actually Lose Weight!

At first glance intuitive eating looks and sounds like a free pass to be lazy and eat unhealthily.

However, when you begin to practice and commit to the principles you realize that the mindset surrounding intuitive eating actually creates healthier choices naturally.

Intuitive eating is all about letting go of the guilt and shame that surround food.

It allows you to stop eating in a reaction to these feelings because you are instead taking these negative feelings out of eating, by following the intuitive eating principles.

This is what truly begins to raise your mindset and vibration to a place where you are not rewarding or punishing yourself with food, but instead allowing food to be just as it is.

A natural part of life.

Intuitive eating is not a free pass, it’s a mindset shift that allows you to be free of the negative emotions surrounding eating and body image.

Intuition is not generally something we rely upon these days as we look to authority figures, books, gurus and proven plans for for pretty much all of our decision making. Intuitive eating requires you build your intuition and self awareness.

To eat intuitively, you may need to relearn how to trust your body. To do that, you need to distinguish between physical and emotional hunger:

• Physical hunger: This biological urge tells you to replenish nutrients. It builds gradually and has different signals, such as a growling stomach, fatigue, or irritability. It’s satisfied when you eat any food.

• Emotional hunger: This is driven by emotional need. Sadness, loneliness, and boredom are some of the feelings that can create cravings for food, often comfort foods. Eating then causes guilt and self-hatred.

Once you get a good feel for distinguishing the difference between emotional hunger and physical hunger it becomes easier to gravitate towards healthier choices.

Emotional Eating- How to Identify and Overcome it.

The Problem with intuitive eating:

Intuitive eating is not an excuse to eat fast food or binge on unhealthy food items because your body is “asking” for it.

There is no way that your intuition is going to ask for something that isn’t good for it.

The danger with intuitive eating is that it can be used as an excuse to eat unhealthy since the rules of this diet are much less strict than others. It becomes another socially approved of way to avoid or numb emotional hunger. So be aware of using intuitive eating as a way to condone and feel better about unhealthy habits.

True intuitive eating is accurately listening and meeting our emotional and physical hungers in healthy and productive ways.

Sometimes coaching clients prefer one diet over another because they want to keep unhealthy bad habits. For instance someone will choose a diet that allows alcohol or sweets. They want to get healthy but try very hard to find ways to keep the things that make them unhealthy.

Same goes for intuitive eating.

I have seen clients, that are not truly ready to let go of the things that are causing their weight gain or contributing to unhealthy habits, who begin this eating style purely to fool themselves into believing they are improving, while keeping the same bad habits under a “healthier” name. Instead of overeating, binge eating or eating fast food they are now “intuitively eating.”

Alexis- Life Coach

If you don’t deal with the root cause, you will find yourself in new situations dealing with the same problems. You can convince yourself of anything, except results.

You will know when you are truly intuitively eating when your food choices and habits are healthy and balanced.

The 10 principles of intuitive eating are:

1. Reject the diet mentality

The diet mentality is the idea that there’s a diet out there that will work for you. Intuitive eating is the anti-diet.

2. Honor your hunger

Hunger is not your enemy.

Respond to your early signs of hunger by feeding your body. If you let yourself get excessively hungry, then you are likely to overeat.

3. Make peace with food

Call a truce in the war with food.

Get rid of ideas about what you should or shouldn’t eat.

4. Challenge the food police

Food is not good or bad and you are not good or bad for what you eat or don’t eat.

Challenge thoughts that tell you otherwise.

5. Respect your fullness

Just as your body tells you when it’s hungry, it also tells you when it’s full.

Listen for the signals of comfortable fullness, when you feel you have had enough. As you’re eating, check in with yourself to see how the food tastes and how hungry or full you are feeling.

6. Discover the satisfaction factor

Make your eating experience enjoyable. Have a meal that tastes good to you. Sit down to eat it.

When you make eating a pleasurable experience, you may find it takes less food to satisfy you.

7. Honor your feelings without using food

Emotional eating is a strategy for coping with feelings.

Find ways that are unrelated to food to deal with your feelings, such as taking a walk, meditating, journaling, or calling a friend.

Become aware of the times when a feeling that you might call hunger is really based on emotion.

8. Respect your body

Rather than criticizing your body for how it looks and what you perceive is wrong with it, recognize it as capable and beautiful just as it is.

9. Exercise — feel the difference

Find ways to move your body that you enjoy. Shift the focus from losing weight to feeling energized, strong, and alive.

10. Honor your health — gentle nutrition

The food you eat should taste good and make you feel good.

Remember that it’s your overall food patterns that shape your health. One meal or snack isn’t going to make or break your health.

A Final Note On Eating Intuitively:

Planning and finding the limiting beliefs causing unhealthy habits and overeating are what I teach in my 1:1 coaching program.

It is difficult to find your limiting beliefs when you are unaware of what how healthy habits are formed, what healthy beliefs look like and how to find and convert limiting beliefs.

This is what I do for you when you become a client.

I help you to find and convert these things into qualities that work for you and not against you.

The more problems and unhappiness you feel in life, the more limiting beliefs you have and the harder it will be to see all of them.

However I have good news! My style of coaching combined with the intuitive element makes this process and your healing go EXTREMELY fast!!! CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE!