Hiya guys!
It’s been a while since my last two posts in the Intuitive Eating Series! Check out Combat Emotional Eating and When Are We Really Full? to refresh your memory on this topic and to get started with the Intuitive Eating principles. I am looking forward to this series being a comprehensive guide on how to eat according to your own needs by training your gut instinct and trusting your body!
Todays topic goes hand in hand with both of the previous ones. Why? You can’t teach yourself to stop eating once you are satisfied, as opposed to full, if you starve yourself or eat when you are not hungry in the first place. It will also be very hard to differentiate between eating to satisfy hunger and eating to satisfy emotional needs if you are not aware of true hunger signs and oblige to them. Got it?
Eat When You Are Hungry: A Double Edged Sword
For different people, eating when hungry might pose a different challenge. Eating when hungry means you should not eat when you don’t truly feel hungry. But it also means not to ignore hunger signs and not eat when you are hungry. Either way, by not obliging to true hunger signs, you are working against instead of with your body.
Why is honoring your hunger so important for intuitive eating? If you eat when you are not hungry, you are eating according to outside triggers. You see food, get offered cake, are bored, have an emotional breakdown, and so on. That aint got nothing to do with intuition baby. Consequently, if you feel hunger pangs but choose to ignore them you are disrespecting your body and your intuition. Do this often enough and your intuition and perception of hunger will get totally skewed and this is where the shit will hit the fan. Instead of giving you healthy and subtle signs of hunger for whole foods, your body will start throwing you for a loop and demand random foods at random times. And you best believe it won’t be asking for a big scrumptious salad or thick supersmoothies- no, it will demand sugary, fatty processed foods instead.
Time to make amends
Listening to your hunger signs takes practice, especially what with all the outside triggers and our weird ways of dealing with food and eating today. Don’t expect to train your body and intuition within a week.
1. Observe
Before we start flexing your intuition muscle, simply observe what outside triggers you have that make you eat for the wrong reasons (boredom? stress? 6 o’ clock dinner time?). Make mental notes or jot them down in a notebook (writing it down is more efficient). Also write down the times you feel genuine hunger but you choose to not eat for some reason (too busy? not 6 o’ clock yet?).
Do this for a week. Write down what you ate and why, no need to change your behavior just yet if you don’t want to. If you do, still write down what the trigger was and what you were planning on eating. Write down what you could do instead of eating if there was an external trigger, or why it was important to eat at that moment if you were hungry but didn’t eat.
Being aware of why you eat is the first step to change.
2. Train
Time to learn the difference between real physical hunger and external noise and act accordingly. You now know what your pitfalls are, but it might take some practice to understand what real hunger feels like for most people.
Whenever you feel like eating or are about to eat, ask yourself if this is because you are hungry. If you are not sure if it is real hunger or an outside trigger, wait. Wait 10 minutes, drink a small glass of water, and base your decision on how you feel, physically, after that.
Also train yourself to not starve yourself when you are truly hungry. There might be a plethora of reasons why one doesn’t eat when hungry but in the end you have to remember you are not doing yourself any favors with this behavior. Your focus and clarity go down. You can get cranky, or lethargic. Hangry. Your hunger will strike back tenfold later on.
Hunger = eat, please. Always carry some food (fruit!) with you and if you don’t eat because your schedule is a mess, see how you fit in a solution (bring more food with you, prepare a batch of smoothies at night, etc).
3. Develop Coping Mechanisms
Granted, intuitive eating rocks, but sometimes us humans interact with other human beings which can make it a bit harder to live according to our own bodies needs 100%, all the live long day. Work/lunch hours, dinner dates, a roommate, parents or lover that also needs to be fed, you name it.
Work and lunch hours may seem tricky but it’s all about figuring out what works well for you and adjust accordingly. If your lunch break is at 1, figure out what breakfast + snack hold you over till that time and have you a bit hungry for lunch.
If the person you are living with and you like to eat together at the same time it might be helpful to explain to them why it is healthy to eat when you are hungry, instead of eating on the clock. Ideally the other party would also be interested in this, in which case you can together create a time frame in which you are both usually ready for dinner. If not, one of you has to apply the principles I laid out above. See who picks the shortest straw ;)
My #1 solution in all situations? Fruit and veg. If you find yourself hungry but you, for some reason, have to wait with eating, munch on fruit or stuff like cherry tomatoes, paprika and carrot. And likewise if you want your belly to be ready for a nice meal around a certain time skip denser snacks in favor of the lighter fruit and veg and this way you won’t be too hungry nor too full.
Final Thoughts
* Please note that if you suffer from an eating disorder or are recovering from one intuitive eating is possibly a few steps ahead of your game. Focus on normalizing your relationship with food and yourself first, and nourishing the body back to health.
* Listening to your body and intuition will be so much easier if your body is sustained by a healthy diet. If you sorely lack nutrition you would have to be a rocket scientist to figure out, when you are hungry at random times and crave unhealthy foods, what is up. Intuitive eating and a junk food diet do not go hand in hand.
Love,
Sabine
Hiya guys!
It’s been a while since my last two posts in the Intuitive Eating Series! Check out Combat Emotional Eating and When Are We Really Full? to refresh your memory on this topic and to get started with the Intuitive Eating principles. I am looking forward to this series being a comprehensive guide on how to eat according to your own needs by training your gut instinct and trusting your body!
Todays topic goes hand in hand with both of the previous ones. Why? You can’t teach yourself to stop eating once you are satisfied, as opposed to full, if you starve yourself or eat when you are not hungry in the first place. It will also be very hard to differentiate between eating to satisfy hunger and eating to satisfy emotional needs if you are not aware of true hunger signs and oblige to them. Got it?
Eat When You Are Hungry: A Double Edged Sword
For different people, eating when hungry might pose a different challenge. Eating when hungry means you should not eat when you don’t truly feel hungry. But it also means not to ignore hunger signs and not eat when you are hungry. Either way, by not obliging to true hunger signs, you are working against instead of with your body.
Why is honoring your hunger so important for intuitive eating? If you eat when you are not hungry, you are eating according to outside triggers. You see food, get offered cake, are bored, have an emotional breakdown, and so on. That aint got nothing to do with intuition baby. Consequently, if you feel hunger pangs but choose to ignore them you are disrespecting your body and your intuition. Do this often enough and your intuition and perception of hunger will get totally skewed and this is where the shit will hit the fan. Instead of giving you healthy and subtle signs of hunger for whole foods, your body will start throwing you for a loop and demand random foods at random times. And you best believe it won’t be asking for a big scrumptious salad or thick supersmoothies- no, it will demand sugary, fatty processed foods instead.
Time to make amends
Listening to your hunger signs takes practice, especially what with all the outside triggers and our weird ways of dealing with food and eating today. Don’t expect to train your body and intuition within a week.
1. Observe
Before we start flexing your intuition muscle, simply observe what outside triggers you have that make you eat for the wrong reasons (boredom? stress? 6 o’ clock dinner time?). Make mental notes or jot them down in a notebook (writing it down is more efficient). Also write down the times you feel genuine hunger but you choose to not eat for some reason (too busy? not 6 o’ clock yet?).
Do this for a week. Write down what you ate and why, no need to change your behavior just yet if you don’t want to. If you do, still write down what the trigger was and what you were planning on eating. Write down what you could do instead of eating if there was an external trigger, or why it was important to eat at that moment if you were hungry but didn’t eat.
Being aware of why you eat is the first step to change.
2. Train
Time to learn the difference between real physical hunger and external noise and act accordingly. You now know what your pitfalls are, but it might take some practice to understand what real hunger feels like for most people.
Whenever you feel like eating or are about to eat, ask yourself if this is because you are hungry. If you are not sure if it is real hunger or an outside trigger, wait. Wait 10 minutes, drink a small glass of water, and base your decision on how you feel, physically, after that.
Also train yourself to not starve yourself when you are truly hungry. There might be a plethora of reasons why one doesn’t eat when hungry but in the end you have to remember you are not doing yourself any favors with this behavior. Your focus and clarity go down. You can get cranky, or lethargic. Hangry. Your hunger will strike back tenfold later on.
Hunger = eat, please. Always carry some food (fruit!) with you and if you don’t eat because your schedule is a mess, see how you fit in a solution (bring more food with you, prepare a batch of smoothies at night, etc).
3. Develop Coping Mechanisms
Granted, intuitive eating rocks, but sometimes us humans interact with other human beings which can make it a bit harder to live according to our own bodies needs 100%, all the live long day. Work/lunch hours, dinner dates, a roommate, parents or lover that also needs to be fed, you name it.
Work and lunch hours may seem tricky but it’s all about figuring out what works well for you and adjust accordingly. If your lunch break is at 1, figure out what breakfast + snack hold you over till that time and have you a bit hungry for lunch.
If the person you are living with and you like to eat together at the same time it might be helpful to explain to them why it is healthy to eat when you are hungry, instead of eating on the clock. Ideally the other party would also be interested in this, in which case you can together create a time frame in which you are both usually ready for dinner. If not, one of you has to apply the principles I laid out above. See who picks the shortest straw ;)
My #1 solution in all situations? Fruit and veg. If you find yourself hungry but you, for some reason, have to wait with eating, munch on fruit or stuff like cherry tomatoes, paprika and carrot. And likewise if you want your belly to be ready for a nice meal around a certain time skip denser snacks in favor of the lighter fruit and veg and this way you won’t be too hungry nor too full.
Final Thoughts
* Please note that if you suffer from an eating disorder or are recovering from one intuitive eating is possibly a few steps ahead of your game. Focus on normalizing your relationship with food and yourself first, and nourishing the body back to health.
* Listening to your body and intuition will be so much easier if your body is sustained by a healthy diet. If you sorely lack nutrition you would have to be a rocket scientist to figure out, when you are hungry at random times and crave unhealthy foods, what is up. Intuitive eating and a junk food diet do not go hand in hand.
Love,
Sabine