Friday Reading Report: Intuitive Eating

I’m taking this fitness nutrition course on purpose.  I do believe that knowing more about how food creates health in the body is important, but an intellectual approach is not the whole story.  I was pleased to learn about intuitive eating in my text.  (There is a website:  www.intuitiveeating.org)

We don’t eat nutrients.  We eat food.  And we choose foods for lots of different reasons.  Intuitive eating provides us a framework for choice that takes into account our whole selves.

Here are the ten points of intuitive eating.  I’m quoting the points themselves, but the commentary is mine.

1.     Reject the Diet Mentality.  We’re just eating here.  We’re not losing weight, improving our character, or depriving ourselves of happiness in the pursuit of some weird ideal.

2.     Honor Your Hunger.  If we don’t eat when we are hungry, we tend to get too hungry to eat with anything like self-control.  Our goal is to learn to trust ourselves and food.

3.     Make Peace with Food.  Nothing is totally off limits.  Forbidden foods are just temptations for a binge.

4.     Challenge the Food Police.  Our moral worth is not based on our food choices.  We can be good people who eat chocolate cake, or total jerks who eat salad all the time.  The two things are not related.

5.     Respect Your Fullness.  This one can be hard for us because we have stopped paying attention.  We’re hurrying to finish, or we’re paying attention to the conversation, or it seems silly to leave those last three bites.  We need to learn to pause and evaluate whether we feel full, how things taste, whether we’re done.

6.     Discover the Satisfaction Factor.  (I am allowed to use the word “holistic” because I lived in Berkeley for 20 years; it’s a rule.) When eating is a holistic process, one that feeds all our senses, that we design to create pleasure, we find out that we don’t need quite so much food; we’re seeking pleasure, not cake per se.

7.     Honor Your Feelings Without Using Food.  This is another challenging one.  The nice thing about hunger as a need is that it has an obvious solution:  eating.  When the hunger is metaphorical, for company or connection or peace or whatever, we get tempted to feed it with literal food instead of what we are actually hungry for.  We need to seek out the real ways to meet our needs rather than swallowing them along with the Ben & Jerry’s.

8.     Respect Your Body.  Period.  It’s amazing.  No matter what shape it is.  The intuitive eating folks provide a useful way of thinking about it:  if we have size 8 feet, we do not feel like we have to wear size 6 shoes to be beautiful or moral or right.  Some of our bodies are size 8 (or 270 or 93 or whatever random number we choose) and should not be punished for not being some other number.

9.     Exercise—feel the difference.  It’s about how we feel, not about what it does.  When we get energized by our morning walk or feel powerful because of our weight lifting, we want to do it.  Exercise is never supposed to be a punishment.  Sure, it burns calories and can change our body composition, but mostly it improves our outlook.

10.  Honor Your Health—Gentle Nutrition.  We don’t need to eat a perfect diet to be healthy.  We do need to honor what our bodies need to feel well.  We can choose foods we enjoy that give us the best possible health.

Try it!