Intuitive Eating - had to share!
This is a thread where we discuss the principles of intuitive eating and try our best to practice them. You may just be interested in the idea or you may want to live the intuitive way, but please pop in. We do love a chat.
Everyone here is doing a mixture. Some are maybe trying to focus on just one or two of the principles and some are trying to do them all. It really is up to you as long as it works for you and you feel happy with it.
**************************
10 Principles of Intuitive Eating
1. Reject the Diet Mentality Throw out the diet books and magazine articles that offer you false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently. Get angry at the lies that have led you to feel as if you were a failure every time a new diet stopped working and you gained back all of the weight. If you allow even one small hope to linger that a new and better diet might be lurking around the corner, it will prevent you from being free to rediscover Intuitive Eating.
2. Honor Your Hunger Keep your body biologically fed with adequate energy and carbohydrates. Otherwise you can trigger a primal drive to overeat. Once you reach the moment of excessive hunger, all intentions of moderate, conscious eating are fleeting and irrelevant. Learning to honor this first biological signal sets the stage for re-building trust with yourself and food.
3. Make Peace with Food Call a truce, stop the food fight! Give yourself unconditional permission to eat. If you tell yourself that you can't or shouldn't have a particular food, it can lead to intense feelings of deprivation that build into uncontrollable cravings and, often, bingeing When you finally “give-in" to your forbidden food, eating will be experienced with such intensity, it usually results in Last Supper overeating, and overwhelming guilt.
4. Challenge the Food Police .Scream a loud "NO" to thoughts in your head that declare you're "good" for eating under 1000 calories or "bad" because you ate a piece of chocolate cake. The Food Police monitor the unreasonable rules that dieting has created . The police station is housed deep in your psyche, and its loud speaker shouts negative barbs, hopeless phrases, and guilt-provoking indictments. Chasing the Food Police away is a critical step in returning to Intuitive Eating.
5. Respect Your Fullness Listen for the body signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry. Observe the signs that show that you're comfortably full. Pause in the middle of a meal or food and ask yourself how the food tastes, and what is your current fullness level?
6. Discover the Satisfaction Factor The Japanese have the wisdom to promote pleasure as one of their goals of healthy living In our fury to be thin and healthy, we often overlook one of the most basic gifts of existence--the pleasure and satisfaction that can be found in the eating experience. When you eat what you really want, in an environment that is inviting and conducive, the pleasure you derive will be a powerful force in helping you feel satisfied and content. By providing this experience for yourself, you will find that it takes much less food to decide you've had "enough".
7. Honor Your Feelings Without Using Food Find ways to comfort , nurture, distract, and resolve your issues without using food. Anxiety, loneliness, boredom, anger are emotions we all experience throughout life. Each has its own trigger, and each has its own appeasement. Food won't fix any of these feelings. It may comfort for the short term, distract from the pain, or even numb you into a food hangover. But food won't solve the problem. If anything, eating for an emotional hunger will only make you feel worse in the long run. You'll ultimately have to deal with the source of the emotion, as well as the discomfort of overeating.
8. Respect Your Body Accept your genetic blueprint. Just as a person with a shoe size of eight would not expect to realistically squeeze into a size six, it is equally as futile (and uncomfortable) to have the same expectation with body size. But mostly, respect your body, so you can feel better about who you are. It's hard to reject the diet mentality if you are unrealistic and overly critical about your body shape.
9. Exercise--Feel the Difference Forget militant exercise. Just get active and feel the difference. Shift your focus to how it feels to move your body, rather than the calorie burning effect of exercise. If you focus on how you feel from working out, such as energized, it can make the difference between rolling out of bed for a brisk morning walk or hitting the snooze alarm. If when you wake up, your only goal is to lose weight, it's usually not a motivating factor in that moment of time.
10 Honor Your Health--Gentle Nutrition Make food choices that honor your health and tastebuds while making you feel well. Remember that you don't have to eat a perfect diet to be healthy. You will not suddenly get a nutrient deficiency or gain weight from one snack, one meal, or one day of eating. It's what you eat consistently over time that matters, progress not perfection is what counts.
Here is a hunger scale also. There are lots of different versions but they are all based on the same idea.
HUNGER SCALE
10 - STUFFED: so full that you feel nauseous
9 - VERY UNCOMFORTABLY FULL:
you need to loosen your clothes
8 - UNCOMFORTABLY FULL: you feel bloated
7 - FULL: you feel a little bit uncomfortable
6 - PERFECTLY COMFORTABLE: you feel satisfied
5 - COMFORTABLE: you're more/less satisfied,
but could eat a little more
4 - SLIGHTLY UNCOMFORTABLE: you're just
beginning to feel signs of hunger
3 - UNCOMFORTABLE: stomach is rumbling
2 - VERY UNCOMFORTABLE: you feel irritable
& unable to concentrate
1 - WEAK & LIGHT-HEADED: your stomach acid is churning
** Begin eating when you're at a 3 or 4
** Stop at 5, if you're trying to lose weight
** Stop at 6, if you're wanting to maintain your weight
Everyone here is doing a mixture. Some are maybe trying to focus on just one or two of the principles and some are trying to do them all. It really is up to you as long as it works for you and you feel happy with it.
**************************
10 Principles of Intuitive Eating
1. Reject the Diet Mentality Throw out the diet books and magazine articles that offer you false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently. Get angry at the lies that have led you to feel as if you were a failure every time a new diet stopped working and you gained back all of the weight. If you allow even one small hope to linger that a new and better diet might be lurking around the corner, it will prevent you from being free to rediscover Intuitive Eating.
2. Honor Your Hunger Keep your body biologically fed with adequate energy and carbohydrates. Otherwise you can trigger a primal drive to overeat. Once you reach the moment of excessive hunger, all intentions of moderate, conscious eating are fleeting and irrelevant. Learning to honor this first biological signal sets the stage for re-building trust with yourself and food.
3. Make Peace with Food Call a truce, stop the food fight! Give yourself unconditional permission to eat. If you tell yourself that you can't or shouldn't have a particular food, it can lead to intense feelings of deprivation that build into uncontrollable cravings and, often, bingeing When you finally “give-in" to your forbidden food, eating will be experienced with such intensity, it usually results in Last Supper overeating, and overwhelming guilt.
4. Challenge the Food Police .Scream a loud "NO" to thoughts in your head that declare you're "good" for eating under 1000 calories or "bad" because you ate a piece of chocolate cake. The Food Police monitor the unreasonable rules that dieting has created . The police station is housed deep in your psyche, and its loud speaker shouts negative barbs, hopeless phrases, and guilt-provoking indictments. Chasing the Food Police away is a critical step in returning to Intuitive Eating.
5. Respect Your Fullness Listen for the body signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry. Observe the signs that show that you're comfortably full. Pause in the middle of a meal or food and ask yourself how the food tastes, and what is your current fullness level?
6. Discover the Satisfaction Factor The Japanese have the wisdom to promote pleasure as one of their goals of healthy living In our fury to be thin and healthy, we often overlook one of the most basic gifts of existence--the pleasure and satisfaction that can be found in the eating experience. When you eat what you really want, in an environment that is inviting and conducive, the pleasure you derive will be a powerful force in helping you feel satisfied and content. By providing this experience for yourself, you will find that it takes much less food to decide you've had "enough".
7. Honor Your Feelings Without Using Food Find ways to comfort , nurture, distract, and resolve your issues without using food. Anxiety, loneliness, boredom, anger are emotions we all experience throughout life. Each has its own trigger, and each has its own appeasement. Food won't fix any of these feelings. It may comfort for the short term, distract from the pain, or even numb you into a food hangover. But food won't solve the problem. If anything, eating for an emotional hunger will only make you feel worse in the long run. You'll ultimately have to deal with the source of the emotion, as well as the discomfort of overeating.
8. Respect Your Body Accept your genetic blueprint. Just as a person with a shoe size of eight would not expect to realistically squeeze into a size six, it is equally as futile (and uncomfortable) to have the same expectation with body size. But mostly, respect your body, so you can feel better about who you are. It's hard to reject the diet mentality if you are unrealistic and overly critical about your body shape.
9. Exercise--Feel the Difference Forget militant exercise. Just get active and feel the difference. Shift your focus to how it feels to move your body, rather than the calorie burning effect of exercise. If you focus on how you feel from working out, such as energized, it can make the difference between rolling out of bed for a brisk morning walk or hitting the snooze alarm. If when you wake up, your only goal is to lose weight, it's usually not a motivating factor in that moment of time.
10 Honor Your Health--Gentle Nutrition Make food choices that honor your health and tastebuds while making you feel well. Remember that you don't have to eat a perfect diet to be healthy. You will not suddenly get a nutrient deficiency or gain weight from one snack, one meal, or one day of eating. It's what you eat consistently over time that matters, progress not perfection is what counts.
Here is a hunger scale also. There are lots of different versions but they are all based on the same idea.
HUNGER SCALE
10 - STUFFED: so full that you feel nauseous
9 - VERY UNCOMFORTABLY FULL:
you need to loosen your clothes
8 - UNCOMFORTABLY FULL: you feel bloated
7 - FULL: you feel a little bit uncomfortable
6 - PERFECTLY COMFORTABLE: you feel satisfied
5 - COMFORTABLE: you're more/less satisfied,
but could eat a little more
4 - SLIGHTLY UNCOMFORTABLE: you're just
beginning to feel signs of hunger
3 - UNCOMFORTABLE: stomach is rumbling
2 - VERY UNCOMFORTABLE: you feel irritable
& unable to concentrate
1 - WEAK & LIGHT-HEADED: your stomach acid is churning
** Begin eating when you're at a 3 or 4
** Stop at 5, if you're trying to lose weight
** Stop at 6, if you're wanting to maintain your weight
"The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not." ~Mark Twain
(deactivated member)
on 1/3/09 3:02 am - Rochester, NY
on 1/3/09 3:02 am - Rochester, NY
Great stuff, Neecee!! I need them all but will try to work on 4, 5, and 7 first!
Did you give the thread?
Did you give the thread?
No, if I wrote this, I'd write a book! This is from lowcarbfriends site. I do like it and we could see how this thread goes. I'd like to see it get a lot of ongoing discussion. I have not even digested it myself; I want to read it more often. I may put it on my profile just to refer back once in a while.
Just what has soaked in I like and have come to understand: be easier on myself but push forward daily in the smallest way, whether that means to learn from blowing it, or finding a successful way that you can get excited about ot live healthier.
Just what has soaked in I like and have come to understand: be easier on myself but push forward daily in the smallest way, whether that means to learn from blowing it, or finding a successful way that you can get excited about ot live healthier.
"The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not." ~Mark Twain
I have soooo been there with 6-9; probably do revisit more than I admit this on occasion!
One thing that I want to say about #8 (is that the body-acceptance one?) is on behalf of Oprah - looking at her at 200#, i think her body is made for that - she looks killer sexy to me. Yes, her slimmer lines may be more "mainstream", but I am drop dead serious - Sister O needs to chek her body image more closely. She IS the woman she was meant to be. Now i will change my answer if she says that she feels better physically at the lesser weight, has more energy, etc.
This past summer with all the smoke from the wildfires helped me re-visit the Mondo Exerciser compulsion inside me. I could not go out to exercise at all for about 3 months; thank God we left town here and there or it would have been never go out. I am up in weight now that we are here several months past but it's about 5#, and I know that the holidays and traveling had a lot to do with that - so I cannot say exercise lack was all of it.
I think the answer to that exercise compulsion thing is to stay militant, as in make myself do daily movement, but does that movement HAVE to be top level every single day? no, but challenging myself to higher levels 1-2x weekly will help me grow and change.
One thing that I want to say about #8 (is that the body-acceptance one?) is on behalf of Oprah - looking at her at 200#, i think her body is made for that - she looks killer sexy to me. Yes, her slimmer lines may be more "mainstream", but I am drop dead serious - Sister O needs to chek her body image more closely. She IS the woman she was meant to be. Now i will change my answer if she says that she feels better physically at the lesser weight, has more energy, etc.
This past summer with all the smoke from the wildfires helped me re-visit the Mondo Exerciser compulsion inside me. I could not go out to exercise at all for about 3 months; thank God we left town here and there or it would have been never go out. I am up in weight now that we are here several months past but it's about 5#, and I know that the holidays and traveling had a lot to do with that - so I cannot say exercise lack was all of it.
I think the answer to that exercise compulsion thing is to stay militant, as in make myself do daily movement, but does that movement HAVE to be top level every single day? no, but challenging myself to higher levels 1-2x weekly will help me grow and change.
"The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not." ~Mark Twain
I agree about Oprah...her body is too bootilicious not to have some curves. Kinda like moi! But she is judged by the model standard, so I see why she would feel pressured to be smaller. I, on the other hand am judged by DH's standard, so I feel no pressure at all!
And I agree about a happy medium with the workouts. I had to be militant to get the scale to move, but now that it's not moving no matter how militant I get, I'm only going to do hardcore every other day and then just do some cardio on milder days. Hopefully, I will maintain with just that. I'll get back to you in a few weeks to let you know how that works for me.
Mary
And I agree about a happy medium with the workouts. I had to be militant to get the scale to move, but now that it's not moving no matter how militant I get, I'm only going to do hardcore every other day and then just do some cardio on milder days. Hopefully, I will maintain with just that. I'll get back to you in a few weeks to let you know how that works for me.
Mary
Maybe we should each pick one daily and discuss it as it relates to our own journeys? It is the kind of thing - there is so much there, you almost can take one and go off on a tangent no matter who ya are!
"The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not." ~Mark Twain
I think this is a great 'guideline', but #3 would do me in for sure. I would LOVE to make peace with food and I would LOVE to eat all foods in moderation, but unfortunately, overly processed foods are at war with me! Whenever I eat something as innocent as a small portion of frozen pizza, I gain weight, and it's not from the calories. The salt puts on fluid retention pounds, the processed to within an inch of it's life carbs make me swell, and the chemicals bloat my belly. My metabolism just can't handle processing junk anymore, so I've learned to deal with that fact and I no longer feel deprived that I can't have it. Besides, I'm looking at the future cuz I don't want to get type two diabetes. I'm not saying I will NEVER eat pizza, but to make it worth the consequences, it would have to be hand tossed by Emeril HIMSELF! 
Mary
Mary
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