Intuitive Eating (IE) is a style of non-dieting that teaches people to trust their body's signals--the opposite of what most diets do. Rather than trying to "suppress your appetite" or "stoke your metabolism," you focus on eating what your body tells you it needs and wants and stopping when you are full. Therein lies the best part of Intuitive Eating: you eat what you truly want, when you want it. It's also the hardest part: you eat whatever you truly want, only when you truly want it.
A common misconception with IE is that it's a no-holds-barred food fest where you eat anything and everything without limits. While that may sound like diet heaven at first, it would not make your body feel good in the end. And eating what makes your body feel its best is exactly what you are trying to do. You discover pretty quickly--once you start paying attention--that eating bags of jelly beans every day makes you feel tired and sick, while filling up on a salad with protein, veggies, and homemade dressing is energizing (and delicious). It's that slight change of perspective--it's not that the jelly beans are "bad" or "off limits" but rather that you don't feel good when you eat a lot of them--that makes all the difference.
The first step is making these two little changes:
1. Eat un-distracted. Sit down with no books, no TV, no computers, and (at first) no serious conversation to distract you. Without making judgments about it, you want to pay attention to everything you eat. Note how it tastes, how it smells, how you feel when you eat it.
2. Eat only when you are hungry and stop when you are full. I thought that years of stifling, ignoring, or masking my body's hunger cues would make this impossible for me, but our bodies are smart. As I learned to trust mine, I learned that it would, in fact, tell me when it needed food and when it didn't.
It's hard to eat this way in a world with TV screens in restaurant tables and unlimited appetizers. Pushing away your plate when everyone else is still digging into their food is hard. Eating a piece of rich dark chocolate when everyone else is giving up sugar is hard. But none of it is as hard as fighting your body for the rest of your life. Doing these two things will make a huge difference in how you think about food. Food is not a punishment or forbidden fruit or even a decadent excess; it's a life-sustaining gift.
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