Feel Your Fullness: Intuitive Eating Principle 5

Feel Your Fullness: Intuitive Eating Principle 5

May 23, 2020 | Nutrition

Now that you have started to work on Challenging the Food Police you can begin to re-discover what it feels like to be full.  I have referenced this many times, but as kids we are born knowing when to stop eating.  Our bodies naturally tell us when we are full.  I remember working through this principle very vividly.  This was probably the most free I felt during my Intuitive Eating process.  I remember going out to eat with my husband and trying to intentionally feel my fullness.  When I started slowing down and really tuning into feeling full, I felt so empowered.  I had forgotten to listen to fullness and had always let food rules and diets tell me when I was full.  The first time I let myself notice my fullness and pack up the rest of my meal to enjoy again later, I knew that I was on the right track.  Enter, Intuitive Eating principle number five:  Feel Your Fullness:

Listen for the body signals that tell you that you ar eno longer hunger.  Observe the signs that show that you’re comfortably full.  Pause in the middle of eating and ask yourself how the food taste and what your current fullness level is.

The problem is that we don’t listen.  We deprive ourselves and then binge because we have told ourselves we can’t have certain things so when we have these foods we eat too much and way past the point of fullness.  Or, we think we have to clean our plate, maybe a lesson we learned as a child, so we just eat until it is all gone.  The beauty of stopping mid-way is that if you decide you want a few more bites you eat them and move forward.  You get to decide.  Nobody else gets to tell you when you are full.  You are the boss of your body!

Barriers to Experiencing Fullness

  • we are distracted (technology, work, children, etc.)
  • we were trained to eat until our plate was clean
  • our macros or diet tell us we need to eat everything we have planned for that meal
  • we eat too quickly

Leptin – The Fullness Hormone

This hormone tells you when you are full and satisfied.  It acts as our “fat meter”.  For instance, when fat cells increase in size in a healthy person, they produce more leptin, signaling our hypothalamus to do what it needs to do to slow down eating, increase activity and metabolism, and return the fat cells to their previous size.  This helps us to maintain our set-point. 

When we diet this will mess with our leptin production.  Leptin production slows down when we shrink our fat stores beyond our natural weight set-point.  This, in turn, increases our appetite and slows our metabolism and we gain the weight back. Biology.

Ways to Begin to Feel Your Fullness

Think about the Characteristics of Fullness

There are many different ways to experience fullness. Make a list of the ways you experience fullness. Some examples include, stomach feeling full, less thoughts of food, pleasant or good mood, relaxed feeling, and increased energy.  Next time you eat pick one of these and try to stop mid-way and notice these feelings.

Create the Ideal Eating Environment

In our fast-paced society today we often eat while doing other things and do not sit down to fully focus on our meal. We shovel it in while doing work or watching TV and often find that we ate past our fullness point or don’t even remember eating and enjoying our meal. Make a list of some of the barriers that get in the way of you experiencing fullness. Examples include, TV, phone, computer, reading, social media, doing chores, taking care of kids, etc.

Once you have made the list consider how often you engage in any kind of distracted eating. Is it every meal? Is it only snacks? Only breakfast? You get the idea.

Now, create the optimal or ideal eating environment that will help you to avoid eating while distracted. Is there a place in your house or at your work that you can go to, to really focus on eating? Can you turn off your phone? Can you eat while sitting instead of standing? Those are some examples. 

Discover the Staying Power of Foods

Some foods are just satisfying yet don’t keep you full for long. Others are satisfying AND keep you full for longer periods of time. It is helpful to explore these things. Not in a way that makes you create more food rules like, I can’t eat candy because it won’t keep me full. Candy is something that has value in our lives if we want it, but we all know it won’t keep us full or satisfied for instance. 

Make a list of foods in these two categories:

FOODS THAT INCREASE FULLNESS:  these foods contribute to the feeling of comfortable fullness. Examples are proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and fiber filled foods

FOODS WITH LITTLE STAYING POWER:  these kinds of foods make you feel full temporarily but the fullness doesn’t last long because they are low calorie foods so they should be paired with things like protein for instance. Example would be a big salad with no meat, cheese, or dressing. Yes, the greens are great for you but alone they don’t do the job. Other examples are foods like rice cakes, cereal, or sugar free beverages that fill up your belly but offer very little energy.

In order to experience how different foods, make you feel and how they fill you up experiment over the next few days with different pairings of meals and snacks and track how long you stay full.  For instance, an apple by itself may not keep you as full as an apple with nut butter. Or cereal with milk may not keep you as full as a bowl of oatmeal with nut butter and berries. This discovery will help you learn what keeps you full and what does not.  

I would love to hear your wins on this one y’all.  Like I said, this was the most freeing part of this process for me and it still blows my mind that I had lost sight of my fullness for so long! Next week we will discuss principle six and begin to explore how to discover the satisfaction factor.  Join me on Instagram and Facebook in the meantime and have fun shooting those negative thoughts down one by one!  

 

 

 

Challenge the Food Police: Intuitive Eating Principle 4

Challenge the Food Police: Intuitive Eating Principle 4

May 14, 2020 | Mindset, Nutrition

We all hear them.  The voices in our head that say, “you can’t have this”, and “you shouldn’t have that”.  Those voices tell us when we are allowed to eat and when we are supposed to stop eating.  They also tell us that some foods are off limits and only certain foods are allowed. In the Intuitive Eating world these voices are called the food police.  Enter principle four:  Challenge the Food Police:

The food police monitor the unreasonable rules that dieting has created.  The police station is housed deep in your psyche, and its loudspeaker shouts negative barbs, hopeless phrases, and guilt-provoking indictments.  Chasing the food police away is a critical step in returning to Intuitive Eating.  

The first big step in challenging these thoughts is to explore them.  Write them down and begin to dig into each belief and where it came from.  Some examples of food rules or beliefs are:

  • I am not allowed to eat carbohydrates unless I work out
  • I shouldn’t eat after 7pm
  • Sweets are off limits unless it is the weekend

These all or nothing rules come from society, familial, and other influences but tend to take over and ruin your relationship with food and your internal body cues and lead to what is called the deprivation effect.  

The Deprivation Effect

Basic psychology suggests that when we deprive ourselves of something it makes us obsess over it and want it more. Chronic dieting often requires you to follow rigid rules that tell you what you can eat and when. It causes us to second guess our bodies’ needs and ignore our hunger and satiety cues. It works at first but then something like a social event, mental health struggles, or being unprepared and you end up breaking said rules. In the end the extreme restriction leads to overconsumption and the cycle continues.

Diet Restraint Theory

Describes what happens when dieters go off of their diet or break food rules (Polivy and Herman):

  1. The What-The-Hell Effect – success is defined by getting through the day without breaking food rules. If a rule is broken consumption of more food is triggered.

  2. Perception – restrained eaters likely to overeat even if they only perceive that they violated one of their food rules

  3. Anticipation of Food Restriction – consumption of forbidden food increases before and after restriction periods. Anticipation of starting a new diet triggers a farewell to food feast.

  4. The Irony of Thought Suppression – trying to force yourself not to think of food or specific food will cause you to actually think of the food you are trying not to think of more frequently and will increase eating behaviors

  5. The Forbidden Fruit Phenomenon – research on children shows that the more parents restrict children from eating certain things the more the children are likely to rebound and eat more of the forbidden food

What foods make you feel out of control?  What foods, when you eat them, cause you to feel guilt and lead to a binge?  Below are some things you can do to feel better around these “bad” foods or the food rules you follow.

Make a List

In your journal make a list of all of your food rules and foods you consider not good.  Write down what you feel or how you react any time that you break a rule or eat a food that you consider off limits.  Notice if your thoughts seem perfectionistic or unrealistic and see how you can reframe the rules you have set.  Challenge the rules with the opposite logic and change the critical voice inside of your head.  Try to think back to when you first established these rules.  Did they come from your family?  A coach?  A trusted friend?  Think back to why you started on that path.  

Create a Progress Chart

Create a list of experiences that you have with your rules and off limits foods.  Each time you eat one of your forbidden foods or break a rule you have set for yourself make a note of it and write down how you feel.  For instance, “I ate some cookies before bed and I didn’t eat the entire bag like I normally do.  It felt really good to allow myself to eat them and not feel out of control”.  Do this with one rule or food at a time and see how it goes.  Take your time and don’t expect perfection.  Remember, you are challenging the “food police” who have been directing your thoughts for a long time.  This will take time.  

Listen to your Inner Food Voices

Your inner food critic can be very harsh and hard on you.  For instance, if you eat that piece of cake you will gain 5 pounds.  Or, if you eat a piece of pizza you will eat the entire pie.  Practice replacing these negative thoughts with more positive and helpful thoughts.  Change them to, if you eat that piece of cake you will enjoy it and move on.  Or, if you eat a piece of pizza you will have a few pieces and move on.  Every time one of these thoughts pops into your head challenge it.  You are in charge of your thoughts and you can change the thoughts.

Working through the critical thoughts will help you get closer to your inner Intuitive Eater Voice which will help you live a more fulfilling life.  Social outings, work events, and family gatherings will be more fun and you will begin to trust your body again.  

Next week we will discuss principle five and begin to explore how to truly feel our fullness.  Join me on Instagram and Facebook in the meantime and have fun shooting those negative thoughts down one by one!  

 

Make Peace with Food: Intuitive Eating Principle 3

Make Peace with Food: Intuitive Eating Principle 3

May 6, 2020 | Mindset, Nutrition

We have all been there right?  We tell ourselves that we can only eat the cookies on the weekends.  We wait patiently all week and “behave” around food all week perfectly.  Friday comes around and we are faced with the cookies we have waited for.  Do we eat just a few?  Nope.  We eat almost the entire box or bag.  We have lost complete control around the cookies and it ends in a binge and major guilt.  Insert any food you feel out of control around and the cycle continues.  The next day we restrict and maybe even over-exercise to work them off.  Once you have started the process of learning how to listen to and honor your hunger it is time to explore making peace with food.  Intuitive Eating principle number three is to 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 that it usually results in Last Supper overeating and overwhelming guilt.

I am a perfect example of this.  I used to do this very thing.  Friday or Saturday was my “cheat day” where I had all of the foods that I had deemed bad or off limits.  I hung my hat on the fact that I had so much self control, that I could eat 100% clean and restrict all week long, so I deserved a reward at the end of the week.  Sadly this never ended well.  The guilt was intense and the cycle began every Sunday.  

Once I decided to allow all foods into my life again, the process of making peace with food began for me.  When I tell people that they can have whatever they want whenever they want the first thing I hear is, “I will gain so much weight”, or “I will eat everything all of time and lose all of my progress”.  These comments may be accurate, but it is a process y’all.  Neutralizing food and finding food freedom may lead to weight gain at first or bingeing at first but I can tell you from experience that it will definitely end with peace and happiness.  Why wouldn’t you want that?  Let’s explore the psychology of what happens when we restrict.

Diet Restraint Theory

Describes what happens when dieters go off of their diet or break food rules (Polivy and Herman, 1984).

  1. The What-The-Hell Effect – success is defined by getting through the day without breaking food rules. If a rule is broken consumption of more food is triggered.

  2. Perception – restrained eaters likely to overeat even if they only perceive that they violated one of their food rules

  3. Anticipation of Food Restriction – consumption of forbidden food increases before and after restriction periods. Anticipation of starting a new diet triggers a farewell to food feast.

  4. The Irony of Thought Suppression – trying to force yourself not to think of food or specific food will cause you to actually think of the food you are trying not to think of more frequently and will increase eating behaviors

  5. The Forbidden Fruit Phenomenon – research on children shows that the more parents restrict children from eating certain things the more the children are likely to rebound and eat more of the forbidden food

Habituation

Dieting creates what is called the forbidden fruit phenomenon (Jansen, Mulkens, and Jansen 2007) which ends in an increase in consumption of the forbidden foods.  The forbidden foods remain exciting and novel so we continue to put them on a pedestal.  Think about getting a new car.  At first you are in love with it and treat it perfectly.  You wash it every day and make sure it is in tip top condition.  After a while the excitement wears off.  The same thing can happen with your forbidden foods.  This is called habituation and dieting makes sure that the habituation process does not occur so the cycle of restrict, binge, and guilt continues.  

So What can I do to Make Peace with Food?

Make a list of your forbidden foods and food rules

What rules do you have around food?  For instance, “I cannot eat after 7pm”.  What are the foods you tell yourself you cannot have?  Review your list of rules/forbidden foods and write down how you felt the last time you ate them.  How does eating one of your forbidden foods make you feel the rest of the day?  Do you restrict more?  Do you work out more?  

What are your fears around eating your off limits foods?

What are you afraid will happen if you allow all foods?  Weight gain?  Loss of control?  Judgement from others?  Write these down and explore how these fears guide you.  Is it worth it?  

Make a Milestones Chart

Track your progress in making peace with your “bad” foods.  Any time you allow yourself to eat them, write down how you felt before, during, and after eating this food.  Start slow on this one.  Pick one food at a time and expose yourself to it and see what happens.  This isn’t something that will change over night but note changes and small victories over time.  

Baby steps y’all.  Again, this is a lifelong state of mind that you are trying to change.  You have been conditioned to diet and restrict for a long time, so expecting perfection is not realistic.  Be gentle and go easy on yourself.  I’d love to hear your progress on this and your small wins.  Share with me on Instagram or Facebook.  The next principle is to Challenge the Food Police.  Enjoy!  

 

 

Honor Your Hunger: Intuitive Eating Principle 2

Honor Your Hunger: Intuitive Eating Principle 2

Apr 29, 2020 | Mindset, Nutrition

Last week we explored how to begin to reject the diet mentality.  This week we dive into principle two of Intuitive Eating.  We are born with natural cues that tell us when we are hungry and when we are full or satisfied.  Over time, we are exposed to diet culture myths and we lose touch with these signals.  Even worse, we learn to ignore these cues and let diet rules tell us when to eat, how much to eat, and when we are full, in essence causing us to lose trust in our own bodies.  Intuitive Eating, principle 2, is to 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 the first biological signal of hunger sets this stage for rebuilding trust with yourself and food.  

If you need air you breathe, so it stands to reason that if you need food you should eat.  It makes no sense to ignore hunger signals because your macros or calories will be thrown off or because you were told by somebody or some book that you can’t eat at that time of day.  Simply put, if you are hungry, just eat.  Dieters tend to view hunger as a bad thing but it is actually a great thing.  It means your body is working the way it is supposed to!  Here is a little science behind hunger.  

Hormones and Hunger

Ghrelin is our main hunger hormone. Ghrelin receptors are located in the hypothalamus – an area of the brain responsible for appetite controls. The more you ignore hunger the more ghrelin is produced.  So, the more you restrict, the more your body fights back basically. This, in essence, is why diets fail.  When you eat, ghrelin is suppressed, but if you are a chronic dieter ghrelin may stay elevated due to you being in an energy deficit. Studies have shown that ghrelin levels in someone who has been dieting can be elevated for up to a year!!  Hence, rebound weight gain after a diet people!  When you eat, ghrelin levels go down and leptin, our fullness hormone, goes up. Simple right?  Can’t fight biology.  If you continue to not eat enough your body makes more and more ghrelin and you keep feeling hungry and the cycle continues.

A side note on Carbohydrates:  one of the biggest controversies in the nutrition world.  Are they good or bad?  Y’all know how I feel about them and why I think they are so necessary, especially for active people, but did you know that our bodies are hard wired to crave carbs?  

You see, we have a little neurotransmitter called Neuropeptide Y (NPY) that actually increases your appetite for carbs. It is stimulated by our friend ghrelin and drives up cravings for carbs. The more you try to ignore it the more you will end up bingeing on ALL THE CARBS.  And we all know when we are hangry like this, we don’t make the wisest choices for our bodies and minds.  In essence…Eat. The. Carbs.

All of that being said, you might be asking, what do I do if I have been dieting for so long I have no idea when I am actually hungry.  Below are some activities you can do to begin to work through learning how to honor your hunger. 

The Hunger-Body-Mind Connection

When your body is hungry there are many ways that it will let you know that you need to eat.  Mood and energy levels change and even increased thoughts around food can occur.  The longer you wait the more intense hunger becomes.  If you have dieted for most of your life, listening to these body cues will be a challenge at first but the more you listen the more it becomes habit. 

Next time you are hungry make a list of what you feel.  Some examples of this are stomach growling, gnawing in your throat, headaches, cloudy thinking, bad mood or irritable, low energy, or lethargy.  Make a list of these things for a day and practice tuning into those things each and every meal so you can get used to knowing when you are hungry.  

The Hunger Game

The Hunger game activity, developed by Precision Nutrition, will walk you through learning how to notice the physical cues we explored in our first activity.  You will need this PDF to work through this activity:  HungerGame.

After you have done this for several days answer the following questions:

  1. What trends do you notice with your hunger ratings?
  2. At which level does the sensation of hunger feel just right for you?
  3. What pattern of eating, in regard to timing, works best for you?  For instance, do you feel better eating every 4-5 hours or every 2-3 hours?
  4. If you ate lighter or smaller meals, how did that effect the frequency of your hunger?  Do you get hungry sooner rather than if you ate bigger meals spaced out more?

I Can’t Be Hungry Yet!

Have you ever eaten breakfast and then felt hungry an hour later?  We all have.  It can be frustrating and confusing for sure and most of the time we would say “I can’t be hungry, I just ate”.  In this scenario we might just tough it out till lunch and starve throughout the morning since we just ate right?  Consider this, however:

  • You may have had a harder workout the day before. 
  • You may have eaten very little the day before. 
  • Your breakfast may have not been satisfying enough or filling enough and may have just been more of a snack. 
  • You are having just a hungrier day.
  • You had an early morning workout, so you didn’t eat much for breakfast as your hunger was naturally lower when you had breakfast.
  • You are on your period or about to be.

The point here is that you cannot just say “I can’t be hungry” because many factors can be in play.  Honoring your hunger can be confusing but it is the same thing as using the restroom when you feel the sensation to go pee.  It is biological and the more you respond to that cue by feeding yourself the more trust you create between yourself and your body!

Next time you get hungry at a time when you don’t think you should be hungry, think about these other variables and write down how you are feeling.  Do you need to eat to take care of yourself?  Are you avoiding eating because you just ate?  If so, take note of what you ate before you got hungry.  Was it a small meal that doesn’t sustain you?  Should you add to that meal next time?  You get the point.  

You will find that it is very freeing to actually satisfy your hunger and even more freeing when you learn to recognize your fullness.  For now focus on learning to recognize and honor your hunger.  I would love to hear how this goes for you throughout the week so be sure and reach out on my Instagram or Facebook.  Stay tuned for next week when we will address principle 3:  Make Peach With Food.  Happy eating y’all and be sure to add yourself to my mailing list for all things Eat the Banana!

Reject the Diet Mentality: Intuitive Eating Principle 1

Reject the Diet Mentality: Intuitive Eating Principle 1

Apr 22, 2020 | Mindset, Nutrition

In week 1 of my series on Intuitive Eating (IE) I explained what IE entails and outlined the 10 principles that we are going to go over for the next 10 weeks.  For a look back at that you can click here.  This week we are going to dive into principle number one:  Reject The Diet Mentality.  With this principle it is your goal to reject the books, articles, websites, social media channels, and environments that tell us that we are less than if we are not a certain weight.  Learn to ignore the next best diet trend that is going to change your life for good and make the decision to reject anything that gives you hope of getting you to the best shape of your life or to that magic number on the scale.  

As with anything, before you can see improvement or change, you have to first accept that there is a problem or an issue.  In cases of addiction for instance, one has to admit he or she has said addiction in order to make progress.  This is similar, but the problem here is not you, the problem here is diet culture and the messages you have been absorbing your entire life.  As a baby we are a blank slate.  We know how to eat when we are hungry and we know when to stop when we are full.  Unfortunately, diet culture tells us that we should not trust those signals and we lose touch with our natural biology.  It is my goal to help you trust yourself again and improve your mindset around food and exercise.  

Diets do not work in the long run.  We have all been there before right?  We get to our goal weight and we are elated and feel great.  Slowly, however, your weight starts to creep back up to where you started and often times even higher than that.  This is your body telling you that the starvation and deprivation you have put it through is not something it can sustain so it fights back.  It hangs on to whatever it can and strives for homeostasis.  

Dieting actually increases your risk for gaining even more weight than you started with. When you diet you put your body into a famine state and your body and your cells will do whatever it takes to survive. In addition, dieting hurts your psychological health and well-being by damaging trust in your own body because you are following food rules rather than listening to what your body wants and needs (Tribole and Resch, 2017).

Some other harmful effects of dieting are:

  • extreme food preoccupation and obsession
  • bingeing
  • dangerous weight-cycling
  • increased stress
  • mood swings, depression, and anxiety
  • increased likelihood of developing an eating disorder
  • low self esteem
  • body dysmorphia (unrealistic body expectations) 

Below are some suggestions that will help you to begin to reject the dieting mentality.  I recognize that it is hard to make sense of that concept and that it is hart to let go of control.  In my discussions with clients I often hear the fears around letting go of control and mainly that if they don’t diet they will gain 100s of pounds and become obese.  This process takes trust and patience and will be a lifelong journey of self discovery and honesty with yourself.  I recommend getting a journal or notebook to work through this process as we go.

What will I do instead?

Ask yourself what you will do once you reject dieting and drop out of diet culture.  In other words, what will you focus on instead of calorie counting, weighing yourself, exercising just to burn off food, and body perfection.  Preoccupation with food and the scale tends to take us away from real life and true happiness.  For instance, are you truly able to experience a family dinner out if you are too busy calculating the macros of every menu item you are going to order?  Are you truly able to enjoy your family beach vacation if you are obsessing over how you will get your exercise session in each day?  You get my point here.  What are you missing out on?

Explore your dieting history

When you think back on all of your diets you may think that they worked but if you sit down and reflect upon them, you get a chance to see if they truly helped you in the long run.  Make a list of all of the diets you have tried over the years and try to remember how long you were on the diet, if you gained or lost weight, how long the weight stayed off, how much you re-gained if any, and how you felt before and after each diet.  Consider the why behind why you began dieting in the first place.  Notice any trends?  Is it more difficult now to stay on a diet?  Was it easier at first to be successful on a diet?  What is the longest period of time you were able to keep weight off following a diet?  

Get rid of the tools of dieting

We all have them.  Apps, calorie trackers, step trackers, food scales, and scales to weigh ourselves.  One of the most important steps you can take in rejecting the dieting mentality is getting rid of these tools.  All they do is keep you from your natural born intuition.  Delete the apps.  Throw away the scales.  Unfollow and delete any social media accounts that make you feel like you need to lose weight in order to fit in.  Throw away any diet pills, teas, or elixirs that you have in your pantry.  Take this one slowly.  Delete one tool per week if you have to but set a goal to remove it all from your life.  

Be mindful of the script in your brain

As I mentioned above, the diet culture script is engrained in our brains from an early age.  This won’t happen over night but take note of the things you say to yourself in relation to diets.  For instance, do you deem carbs bad, feel guilt when you miss a workout, tell yourself you need to burn off that cake, or starve yourself in order to prepare for a dinner out?  These are just a few examples of the lies we tell ourselves.  When you hear yourself say anything related to diet culture explore it.  Write it down and take note of any patterns or feelings that emerge.  What can you replace these lies with?  

Set a goal for yourself to try one of these things over the next week and please share with me.  Also, if you want another resource on intuitive eating I recommend Eating Enlightenment and this article on the principles of IE.  You can find me on Instagram and Facebook and I’d love to hear your progress and questions.  Next week we will be going over principle 2:  Honor Your Hunger.  As always, be sure to sign up for my weekly email to stay informed on all things Eat The Banana!

 

 

So What is Intuitive Eating?

So What is Intuitive Eating?

Apr 15, 2020 | Nutrition

Intuitive Eating (IE) is currently “all the rage” (a phrase my late grandmother often used to describe popular things) but there is lots of misunderstanding around what it actually is.  What is intuitive eating anyway?  Let me start by telling you what it is NOT:

  • a diet
  • a restrictive plan that rules food groups out
  • exercising to burn off calories
  • a cleanse
  • a 6 week program that ends with you having the body of your dreams
  • a weight goal on the scale
  • a before and after picture 

I could go on an on, and to be honest, it is totally understandable that one would confuse IE with yet another diet but it is quite the opposite.  IE is a lifelong process that will take most of us lots of hard work to unravel society’s diet rules and regulations.  Patience is key and even I still struggle from time to time.  If I am being totally transparent here, when I first saw someone refer to IE I clicked on the link thinking it sounded like a great new diet I could try.  Once I discovered it was quite the opposite I was intrigued and ordered the IE book and became hooked on learning how to get out of diet culture jail.  

Over the next 11 weeks I am going to dive deep into what IE is and the 10 principles that guide the IE process.  This week we will go over the basics of IE and each week we will dive into each principle and how you can start to integrate each one into your lives.  My passion is fueled by how free I have become by discovering this anti-diet philosophy and I want to share it with the world.  Eat The Banana was born out of this philosophy and it is my goal to share it with the world so here it goes!

As explained in my blog on food freedom, IE is a process where you move away from the societal strict views of food rules and dieting to a more non-restrictive and balanced approach to food and weight.  You learn to listen to your hunger and satiety cues and quit obsessing over food.  Created by Evelyn Tribole, MS, RDN and Elyse Resch, MS, RDN, CEDRD, Fiaedp, FADA, FAND, the 10 principles are:

  1. Reject the dieting mentality
  2. Honor your hunger
  3. Make peace with food
  4. Challenge the food police
  5. Feel your fullness
  6. Discover the satisfaction factor
  7. Honor your feelings without using food
  8. Respect your body
  9. Exercise – feel the difference
  10. Honor your health

Why should you explore IE and dropout of diet culture?  First off, diets do not work in the long term and wreak havoc on your hormones, metabolism, and mental health.  Second, these are just a few of the benefits of becoming an intuitive eater:

  • improved relationship with your body and higher body acceptance
  • improved mental health
  • lower stress and cortisol levels
  • higher self-esteem
  • more awareness of hunger and satiety cues so less overeating
  • less yo-yo dieting and weight fluctuation 

Each week we will go into great detail on each principle and I hope that it will help you understand why I have shifted my focus from macro coaching to anti-diet coaching.  It is important to remember that IE is a process.  We have been conditioned at a very early age to believe the diet myths and believe that it is necessary to look a certain way to fit in.  In other words, you will not be able to unravel years and years of learning around food and exercise overnight.  It is imperative that you are patient with yourself and that you realize this will be a lifelong process.  If you are interested in diving in, get yourself a journal and be ready to dig in.  As always you can contact me on Instagram or Facebook and don’t forget that you can now be notified when I write new blogs by signing up for my email list here.  Looking forward to the next 10 weeks y’all!