Intuitive Eating and Recovery: How to Move Beyond Fasting and Diet Culture

 

When we’re young, we’re usually not taught enough about healthy eating habits but served with the outdated “advice” that’s been doled out for decades. You can hear, “That’s bad for you, don’t eat it!” and “That will make you fat!” just about anywhere, yet few people try to explain how different foods affect our bodies and why it’s vital to be mindful about what and how we eat.

 

Diet culture has wreaked havoc on generations, basing the relationship with food on “sins,” deprivation of treats like the most, and constant hunger when the truth is on the other side of the spectrum. This is where intuitive eating comes to the stage. Learning more about our body’s inner workings and understanding what hides behind unhealthy eating mechanisms is the path to feeling good in your skin and relinquishing the diet culture. Here are some tips to get you started.

How does intuitive eating work?

Intuitive eating is all about breaking apart the myths and quick fixes brought in by the diet culture, and it’s a process that takes time and dedication. This practice takes us back to the roots – eating when we feel hungry, accepting all foods, and, above all, honoring and loving our bodies. There are 10 principles of intuitive eating, each of which is like a pillar that can support you in your journey to build eating habits that work for you.

 

The truth is that there’s no “one size fits all” program that will help you feel good, lose weight, or get rid of food intolerances. Developing a healthy relationship with food, eating, and your body is a deeply personal journey, one that lasts your whole life and that is likely to have bumps and dead ends on it. And that’s how it’s supposed to be! Changes don’t happen overnight; when you expect them to, they only pull you away from what feels good and supports you.

Biggest Intuitive Eating Lessons to Keep in Mind

Leave Dieting Behind

We need to start here because this is the biggest stumbling block to a good relationship with eating habits. Glorifying a certain body type while shunning others, moralizing foods (classifying them as “good” and “bad”), and obsessive body monitoring can lead to a whole array of physical and mental health problems.

 

This approach to food consumption can be incredibly detrimental to our overall well-being and sometimes lead to extreme behaviors and choices. Fasting is a good example. While autophagy brings many long-term benefits, fasting is often considered “a fast track to weight loss,” which contradicts its original idea. 

 

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try this approach but rather do it mindfully so that it heals your body, decreases inflammation, and naturally reuses waste materials in your cells. This could mean starting slowly with a pliant fasting schedule, being able to track your fast through apps, food journaling, or something else that feels natural to you.

Honor Your Hunger and Satiety Cues

Understanding our hunger and satiety cues is another big topic that hasn’t been discussed enough. Eating is a natural impulse, so there isn’t much to be explained, right? Not quite, especially not in a society where we have just about any food we can think of at the tip of our fingers, and the supply is constantly higher than the demand.

 

That’s why following hunger cues and eating soon after you feel them is important. Otherwise, you risk getting excessively hungry, which could result in overeating. When you’re very hungry, honoring your satiety cues is much harder because your body focuses on getting all the energy it can all at once. If you mindfully approach your hunger cues and honor them, it will be much easier to honor your satiety cues as well and avoid overeating.

Feeling and Accepting Your Emotions Will Nurture Intuitive Eating Practices

We live in a world where burying your emotions is much “easier” than feeling and accepting them, no matter how painful or uncomfortable they can be. Using food as a distraction and a numbing agent from everything we suppress has become all but normal, and a slew of eating disorders comes from this phenomenon. 

 

The root of the issue is that just like we weren’t taught how much impact food has on our health, we weren’t taught how to manage our emotions, so in a way, it makes sense that the two faulty mechanisms came together. The only way to feel good is to be kind and compassionate toward yourself because that’s the basis of well-being. 

 

When we’re not mindful of how we’re feeling and instead try to suppress it, our bodies respond, whether through an illness, jumbled hormone production, or poor mental health, sometimes all three. Food can help numb your feelings because your body focuses on something other than the emotion. The only way to build healthy eating habits is to work on accepting yourself and your wide array of emotions, as it will make everything else easier.

Conclusion

Intuitive eating opens a window into ourselves. It gives us an opportunity to understand what makes us tick and what patterns need replacing. It’s not a quick fix, and it’s definitely not easy, but with a bit of time, you may come to understand that it feels natural to you, and more importantly, it makes you feel good, healthy, and strong.