Nutrition feels extremely complicated when there’s so much information. One day the research shows coconut oil can cure your entire life, the next it’s causing heart disease. Nutrition can be very intimidating and a sense of restriction comes along with it sometimes when we try to implement in the way the dieting and more recently “wellness” culture has taught us.
There’s one thing most of the advice we receive at least has right; a variety of foods in your diet, predominantly fruits, vegetables and good sources of fats and proteins is the most optimal way to eat. Honouring nutrition is important, however somewhere along the way we turned an opportunity to deeply understand and nourish our bodies, to a constant pursuit of weight loss and thinness.
When we are pursuing nutrition for all the wrong reasons, starting with the intent of altering weight, we become disconnected from our body’s unique way of sending us signals and cues.
Educating myself on eating intuitively felt like a life changing understanding, after years of chasing the same fallacies around changing my weight, that lead me into some extremes of disordered eating. As a nutritionist and someone who’s recovered from an eating disorder, it really changed my perception around food.
Essentially, Intuitive Eating is a 10 Step Method designed by two nutritionists, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, whose research showed that once people learned these concepts like demoralizing food choices, understanding hunger and fullness, and eating mindfully, that people were able to once and for all create a lifestyle change that worked for them!
“How does Intuitive Eating work with nutrition if the concept
is that you’re allowed to eat anything you want?”
The point is this, the more we restrict a certain food, the more likely we are to desire it. Heck, reducing your calories down to 1,200 or less a day, alone will force you eventually to experience extreme hunger due to the deprivation.
(See the Minnesota Starvation Experiment if you’re curious about the science behind this).
Eating anything, liberating yourself and learning to trust your body, doesn’t mean that there’s no room for nutrition advice and for making mindful informed choices. In fact, I probably have been healthier than ever before, mentally and physically once I learned to understand my body again.
Curious on how to start navigating nutrition and your diet in an intuitive way?
Here are my 5 Easy Steps for Eating Intuitively:
Evaluate & Write about all food rules, restrictions, or dieting advice that currently influence your eating habits
Challenge your inner food police by incorporating fear foods one at a time back into your diet
Give yourself unconditional permission around any type of food or quantity you desire to be satisfied, until that food becomes less and less appealing, this is called food habituation
Be mindful of your hunger and fullness cues, this is a daily practice until you become fully attuned
Try new foods! Recipes or experiments, make food exciting again and don’t settle for anything less than complete satisfaction!
If you’re looking for more guidance on how to start eating more intuitively and understanding your body, find me on Instagram @franniesfoodfreedom or www.franniesfoodfreedom.com