Intuitive eating principles may go against everything you’ve heard about weight loss in your adult life, but that’s exactly the point.
Eating intuitively really is remembering how to trust your body's innate signals, which is the opposite of what most diets do. Rather than trying to suppress your appetite or go hungry, it is about focusing on eating when and what your body tells you and stopping when you are satisfied.
I think you'll discover pretty quickly that once you start paying attention to how your body feels you'll notice that eating chocolate all day, every day leaves you feeling fatigued and sick while filling up on vegetables, clean protein and healthy fats is energizing. It's not to say that chocolate is "bad" but rather to notice how your body feels if that is all that you ate.
I believe a key for eating intuitively is to eat mindfully. To remove distractions while eating so that you can pay attention to your body's innate signals. Bring awareness to how food tastes, smells and employing all of your senses to the experience of eating. A key part of eating mindfully is slowing down how fast you consume your food. It takes 20 minutes for your stomach to signal your brain that it's full. If you inhale your meal in 5-10 minutes it is really easy to overconsume and eat past the feeling of fullness. By slowing down how fast you consume your meals, you will naturally eat less which will, in turn, support healthy sustainable weight loss.
Intuitive eating for weight loss is about eating only when you’re hungry and stopping when you’re full. Give yourself permission to eat when you’re physically hungry. Rating your hunger on a scale of 1-10 throughout the day will aid you in re-learning to trust your hunger cues, The fact is, that your body will and does tell you when it needs food and when it doesn’t, you just need to listen.
A key factor for sustainable weight loss is to stop labelling foods as "good" or "bad". When we tell ourselves that food is "bad" and that we aren't allowed to have it, we tend to fixate or obsess over it. This is exactly why restrictive diets fail and you may end up binge eating the foods you labelled as "bad". At the end of the day, food is food. It's how food feels in your body that is the true key to wellness.
What to do next...
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