If you’ve had a traumatic or complicated relationship with food, it might feel foreign or wrong to trust your body to tell you when to eat. If you’ve been dieting for a long time, you may have been relying on external cues (like rules or restrictions) to tell you when, how much and what kinds of foods to eat. Honestly that’s really exhausting, frustrating and kinda sucks the fun out of eating. Plus, a lot of research demonstrates that we feel out of control around food when we restrict it. I’m hoping your interest in a new approach is what brought you here (and ps thanks for visiting.)
Thankfully, there is another option. It’s called intuitive eating (and if there were no such thing as diet culture, we’d just call it “normal eating”). Intuitive eating is based on 10 principles and is backed by a lot of studies (and more are being done!).
Intuitive eating is not the hunger-fullness diet. It does not promise weight loss or gain. It’s about getting back in touch with your body, eating for satisfaction, enjoying food, respecting your natural body size and developing a more harmonious relationship with food.
To practice listening and honoring your hunger and fullness cues, I’ve created a chart to use before and after eating. Ideally, we don’t want to be at either far end of the scale (starving or overstuffed), and the goal is to finish an eat occasion at a 6-7.
However, (!!!) perfect eating does not exist and there will be times when you miss the mark by eating too little or too much. No problem. Practice! In fact, acknowledge there will be times that you knowingly eat past fullness (e.g. a celebration or Thanksgiving). That is okay and quite normal. The goal is to eventually get to a place where you’re more consistently finishing around a 6-7 but not put too much pressure to (1) get it “right” all the time or (2) get it “right”, right away.