With so many of us obsessed with diet and food, wouldn’t it be nice to go a day without worrying about what to eat, how many calories it contains and if it’s healthy?
Intuitive eating is all about listening to your gut and training your brain to listen to your hunger pangs. When you wake up at six o’clock every morning, are you immediately hungry?
If not, why force yourself to eat breakfast just because we “must” eat breakfast?
Have you seen how toddlers eat? Babies and very young children instinctively know when and how much to eat. They also choose healthy options quite often.
We’re all equipped with innate cues and signals that tell us we’re hungry, thirsty, moody, tired. Where we go wrong is in misinterpreting these cues. So, we feel hungry. We eat. The problem is that we often ignore the cue from our body that we’ve had enough.
Intuitive eating is about stopping to listen to the signals your body’s sending you. Dr Sherry Zhang, a nutrition researcher at the Medical College of Wisconsin, explains the benefits: “The cues are linked not just to the types of foods, but also to feelings of hunger and satiety, and to how food is linked to an emotional response. If you can really quiet down your body for a day or two, you'll be able to have a very good intuition for what is really agreeable to how your body is programmed.”
Intuitive eating is also about realism. In the book Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, they write, “Accept your genetic blueprint. Just as a person with a shoe size of eight wouldn’t expect realistically to squeeze into a size six, it’s equally futile and uncomfortable to have a similar expectation about body size. It’s hard to reject the diet mentality if you are unrealistic and overly critical of your body shape.”
Disclaimer
This article is for informational purposes only. Always check with your doctor or medical practitioner about any health concerns, before embarking on any fitness or nutrition programme, and usage of any medication.