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Intuitive Eating: a Holistic View
I have spent ten weeks looking at different aspects of intuitive eating. There are many different pieces of the puzzle. As I approached the 10 weeks mark, I started to feel all these pieces beginning to work together as one, and seeing an intuitive eater gradually emerge from within me. He is not composed of pieces, he’s one and whole. I am beginning to see intuitive eating as a whole too. Let me attempt to define intuitive eating with this new insight in mind. Intuitive eating is an approach to changing an unhealthy relationship with food and ourselves developed as a consequence of dieting by learning to tune into our body’s expert guidance and developing a self-care attitude.
The Stop Button
The "stop button" (feeling when enough is enough while drinking and stopping there) for me looks like this:
An Active Lifestyle: Nothing’s Hard for me to do
I wrote about my grand-grandfather’s wisdom in the context of intuitive eating. I think it was him who inspired an attitude in my father I would like to share with you. My father tries to live by this mantra: “Ništa mi nije teško”, meaning, “Nothing is hard for me to do”. My dad grew up in a village where everyone had to do hard physical work to survive. And strange as it may sound, he fell in love with it – he has been returning to his village since I know him – next to working a hard full time job and raising the family – working the land (he has a big orchard) and raising honey bees as his hobby. He is now retired for more than a decade, spending most of the year outside, in his garden, and with his bees. In his seventies, he is one of the healthiest and fit men I know.
Week 10: The Joy of Movement – Ultimate Self-Care
Sorry for skipping a week – I had a tough period and I needed to take care of me. It's appropriate then to close the 10 Week Challenge with this principle: Exercise – Feel the Difference. Note: this is in fact the 9th principle of Intuitive Eating, but I decided to spend the week 9 thinking about Gentle Nutrition.
Car Free Day in Brussels
Developing an attitude of self-care
I've gone through different phases on my moderation journey. After learning about practice, I set myself a goal to drink BTB for 30 days. The 30 days were extended to 6 months. Then I started noticing the negative effects of setting myself strict rules.
Week 9: How do different foods make me feel?
This is a week focused on gentle nutrition. I tried to be more non-judgingly aware of what I ate (I logged my meals on daytum.com) and how the different foods made me feel. You don’t need to read all the statements of how different foods make me feel at the end of the post. What I really want is to give an example of making these things as explicit as I can so that I start to naturally choose the foods that make me feel better.
Week 9: Make Every Step Count and Stick
I've been thinking a lot about the nature of this transformation process. My initial experience with moderation thought me about habit change and the importance of practice. I've approached intuitive eating in the same way. And I failed. Well, I don't like this word - I learned how not to do this. Intuitive eating is about healing and gentle transformation from within.
Week 9: Honor your Health – Gentle Nutrition
This is supposed to be a week devoted to exercise. But an experience of this weekend made me really want to think about gentle nutrition – the 10th principle. This Friday, after a day from hell, we all (we have some guests over) went out for a round of drinks, and then grabbed a takeout pizza on our way home – the fatty, salty kind. It felt rewarding. We were all hungry, and we all ate too much. My whole weekend was impacted by this experience. I felt bloated the next day and anything I ate felt like overeating.
So I will swap the 9th and 10th intuitive eating principle and focus this week on gentle nutrition.
Week 8: 10 Ways to Respect Your Body
To close this week dedicated to respecting our bodies, I will offer a collection of 10 different ideas on how to achieve this principle.
Matt, English Bay Beach, Vancouver
1. Say farewell to the fantasy. You may not like to hear this, but your weight expectations may simply not be realistic for your body type. You may never reach the weight of your dreams. 2. Challenge the body police. It’s not only the food police putting us down. Learning how to respect our bodies is very much about challenging our habitual distorted thinking patterns. 3. Reject body discrimination. “Weightism" seems to be one of the last forms of socially accepted discrimination. Examine your own thoughts and attitudes. Do you make unfounded assumptions about overweight people in your environment? Develop an open mind and empathy towards others who are being discriminated against. It will help you have compassion for yourself. 4. Challenge the culture. There is a tremendous social pressure to lose weight. Probably most people around you think overweight people should lose weight. And that “it’s only matter of discipline – eat less and move more, how difficult can it be?” Lean body is idolized by our culture. It’s very hard to reject diet mentality and respect our bodies in such environment. I think it’s important we recognize this (and give ourselves the time to overcome these detrimental messages). Here is a great quote from the Health at Every Size Book. An idea for a reply on someone’s comments on your weight: “Why would I want to lose weight when I'm so damn gorgeous??” She offers other great replies, but this one really spoke to me. Don’t we come in all shapes and sizes? Aren’t we unique? Aren’t we simply damn gorgeous? The book offers a ton of dogma-busting insights into the culturally accepted myths. 5. Live a full life now. Don’t wait to lose those last couple of pounds. Start living the life you today. Get active, dress nicely, go out, be with people, do nice things for your body: massage, sauna, bubble baths… 6. Change the body assessment tools. Kick out the scales and clothes that don’t fit. Marilyn Wann developed a “Yay Scale” that gives you a different compliment each time you step on it - instead of numbers. 7. Take care of your body. Keep it fed (honor your hunger), rested, clean, warm, healthy. We may be used to misuse our bodies that serve us with such dedication our whole lives. Think about the times when you deprived your body of something it needs. Think of your body as a child, your inner child. Imagine that child deprived. What do you want to tell him? Do comfort her 8. Respect your fullness and feel the satisfaction. When we stop eating when our body tells us it had enough, it will be thankful. Feed it with foods it craves and it will reward you with intense feelings of satisfaction. Respect your body by taking the undistracted time to eat. You will start winning its trust back. It will make you feel good. Next time, it will speak up slightly louder and clearer. It will make you feel satisfied. Our body will start relaxing, and converging to its natural state. As it starts trusting you, over time it will even shed some of the unnecessary weight. It's also about stopping the misuse - misusing our bodies by overfeeding it to distract ourselves from emotions. Which brings me to my next point: 9. Cope with feelings without food. To cope with our feelings without using food is to respect both our body and our soul. Bothersome emotions are symptoms. They are the signal that our soul uses to tell us something is wrong, that some of our needs are unmet and that we need to take care of ourselves. We may be hurting. Maybe someone is hurting us, or we are hurting our selves (maybe our inner food police or body police is beating us up). Let’s forgive ourselves for not knowing better – we coped by using food and we survived. But let’s also pledge to nourish our bodies respectfully and take care of our real needs 10. Find support. Search for non-judgmental people in your environment you can talk to. Maybe you need to educate them. There is a lot of support on the Internet – this and many other blogs being one of the forms. Read books – I warmly recommend both the Intuitive Eating and the Health at Every Size books. Take good care of yourselves.
Week 8: Respect your Body
Re-reading this chapter in the Intuitive Eating book left me feeling confused and conflicted.
