TEN PRINCIPLES OF INTUITIVE EATING
1. Reject The Diet Mentality
Throw out the diet books that offer you the false hope of losing weight quickly, easily and permanently. If you allow even one small hope to linger that a new and better diet might be lurking around the corner, it will prevent you from being free to discover Intuitive Eating.
2. Honour Your Hunger
KEEp your body fed with adequate energy and carbohydrates. otherwise you can trigger a primal drive to overeat. (once you reach the moment of excessive hunger, all intentions of moderate, conscious eating fly out the window.) Learning to follow this first biological signal sets the stage for rebuilding trust in yourself and in food.
3. Make Peace With Food
GIvE yourself unconditional permission to eat. If you tell yourself that you can’t or shouldn’t have a particular food, it can lead to intense feelings of deprivation that lead to bingeing.
4. Challenge The Food Police
ScrEaM a loud ‘no’ to thoughts that declare you’re ‘good’ for eating minimal calories or ‘bad’ because you ate a piece of chocolate cake. chasing the Food police away is a critical step.
5. Discover The Satisfaction Factor
In our compulsion to comply with diet culture, we often overlook one of the most basic gifts of existence: the pleasure and satisfaction that can be found in the eating experience. when you eat what you really want, in an environment that is inviting, the pleasure you derive will be a powerful force in helping you feel satisfied and content.
6. Feel Your Fullness
LISTEn for the body signals that tell you you’re no longer hungry. observe the signs that show you’re comfortably full. pause in the middle of eating and ask yourself how the food tastes, and what your current hunger level is.
7. Cope With Your Emotions With Kindness
anxIETy, loneliness, boredom and anger are emotions we all experience. Each has its own trigger and each has its own appeasement. Food won’t fix any of these feelings. It may comfort in the short term. But food won’t solve the problem.
8. Respect Your Body
accEpT your genetic blueprint. Just as a person with a size 8 shoe would not expect to squeeze into a size 6, it is equally futile (and uncomfortable) to have a similar expectation about body size. respect your body, so you can feel better about who you are. 9. Movement: Feel The Difference
ForGET militant exercise. Just get active and feel the difference. Shift your focus to how it feels to move your body, rather than the calorie-burning effect of exercise. one of the reasons women don’t enjoy exercise is that they’re often doing it while underfeeding their body as part of a diet.
10. Honour Your Health
MaKE food choices that work for your health and tastebuds while making you feel good. remember, you don’t have to eat perfectly to be healthy. you won’t suddenly get a nutrient deficiency from one snack, or one meal. It’s what you eat consistently over time that matters. progress, not perfection, is what counts.
adapted by alison Roberts from Intuitive eating, by evelyn tribole and elyse Resch (St Martin’s Griffin, £12.99) © evelyn Resch & elyse Resch 2012. to order a copy for £10.40, visit www.mailshop.co.uk or call 01603 648155. Offer valid until april 30, 2020. p&p free. a new, updated edition will be published in June.