After this week’s reflection, I gained two insights I’d like to share with you. A first one is my belief that if I don't diet, I will gain more weight. I think I am right to believe that – if I don't change anything about my eating behavior. I’ve been losing weight until summer last year. During my long summer vacation, I gained a couple of pounds. It was around the time I was back I started practicing intuitive eating. I did it in an ad-hoc way, without a real plan, and without going through all of the principles. Since then I gained another 3-4 pounds.

At this moment, I see only two ways to reject diet mentality: accept being overweight; or create and follow a roadmap to a healthy, balanced, intuitive eating behaviour. I simply do not want to accept the former. I know I can do this. Change is typically a long learning process, and true to our human nature, we learn from our mistakes. This is exactly what I am trying to achieve: I regrouped, and I adapted my approach. Therefore the 10 weeks intuitive eating challenge – this time around I want to take the time to reflect and practice each and every of the 10 principles.

Why a roadmap? Creating a written plan is a great way to aid our efforts to change. To borrow the words of a dear friend, the act of sitting down and physically writing out these things helps to implant them into your consciousness. It involves your senses. It makes you actively think these things through. In addition, it’s a way to program your RAS – which stands for Reticular Activating System, a part of your brain that has a job to ‘zoom in’ on things that we should be focusing on. For example, if you are reading a newspaper on a subway, and you are surrounded by many usual noises (train, people moving, distant chatter…), they probably won’t affect your attention. On the other hand, if whilst reading your paper a guy pulls out a gun and starts shouting, your attention would be on it instantly and your body would start taking necessary action to help you get out of the situation.

Our RAS focuses on things of known importance and priority to us, so if you like you could also ‘train it’ to become a goal-seeking mechanism. One way to train it is to sit down and write a plan. You create the filter in the RAS that wakes you up and says pay attention to this.

So when I said I will create a roadmap, I was not kidding. I will start creating it today. This will be the place where I will collect all the insights, and develop my plan. I will share pieces of the roadmap with you, as I build it.

Will you consider creating a roadmap?