Intuitive Eating in Practice

Today I had my favorite dish for lunch – a mozzarella salad made with fresh mozzarella, tomato, and avocado slices topped with fresh basil and extra-virgin olive oil. Some slices of fresh white bread to dip into the oil spiced with salt, garlic, basil and dried tomato flakes. Pure heaven if you are into Italian style cuisine.

You might have heard (or not) about Intuitive Eating (IE) – which is probably the best tool out there for normalizing eating. My free online course that starts on September 4^th will include among others a short introduction to IE, so check it out if you wish to participate. Anyways, one of the more important principles of IE is to honor your hunger and feel your fullness.

As a long-time dieter who pursued weight-loss for at least 15+ years of my life, I was never able to really feel my fullness – or as I prefer to call it, my satisfaction. Hunger was never a problem for me – I think I felt always hungry which was most likely due to all the restriction!

Unfortunately, Intuitive Eating is often turned into hunger-fullness diet where one is “not allowed” to eat unless one is physically hungry – and that’s problematic in itself. This will likely become a whole separate blog post at some point. Anyways, to avoid such misconception of IE, I like to use appetite instead of hunger, and satiety or satisfaction instead of fullness.

Now that we are clear on terms and how I use them, let me show you the “before and after” pictures of my lunch plates. I have prepared a large portion of the salad and multiple slices of bread. Since I am acutely aware that any restriction of food will likely result in reactionary overeating – on purpose I am putting more food than I think I am hungry for:

After I was finished eating a good-sized portion of the food I prepared (I worked up quite an appetite since my breakfast four hours earlier) my plates looked like this:

Notice that I have some leftovers – I was not able to eat one slice of bread and some of the salad. My old me would have eaten everything off these plates without any regard to satiety or fulness I felt at this point. My current me felt very decisively that this food no longer will bring me any pleasure or satisfaction – on the contrary, it may cause belly ache. My new me simply stored the remaining salad to add perhaps at dinner or tomorrow’s lunch.

I also discovered it was not the only tiny container with leftovers stored in my fridge. My husband is very much an intuitive eater (an example of someone who has never really dieted so luckily never lost the connection to the internal hunger and fullness signals) so the below containers with French fries and beans can be blamed on him

This is how Intuitive Eating looks in practice (at least some of it!). It is not more complicated than that – listening to the signals that the body is sending, respecting the body needs, and trusting that it knows best what it needs. We say it is simple, but not easy for a reason – we are not used to listening to and trusting our bodies. We live locked in our heads, disconnected from a lot of embodied experience – often due to our history, early childhood experiences, and even trauma.

Finding a good support on this journey really is the best option and I wish to share it as widely as possible – so, as mentioned, for a limited time (only 3 days left in fact!), you can sign up for this free course to learn a bit more. Either way, I wish you all the best on your way to food peace and freedom!