Tips for Intuitive Eating

Are you up for a challenge?

Try this with me.

Set a timer for one minute and keep completing the following sentence until your timer goes off.

“Food is……”

What words or phrases came up?

Take a moment to scan what you have written and notice: Are there some oppositions?

Words like pleasure, joy, and comfort right alongside words like lethal, destructive, and enemy?

If that’s the case, know you’re not alone.

Food can easily be both our friend and our foe, and our relationship with food can be a tricky one.

Let’s take a closer look at the dynamics of this relationship with food.

Why do we eat?

There are two main reasons…

1. Food is Fuel: To supply our bodies with the energy it needs to think, produce, feel, move and live.
2. Food is Pleasure: To be enjoyed, shared, savored and tasted.

And yet, due to our own upbringing and experiences in our lives, we have developed all kinds of different relationships, beliefs, and attitudes around food.

What is your relationship with food?

(Take a look at your answers from above to help)

Is food love?

• “Eat another piece of cake, Grandma made it just for you.”
• “Don’t disappoint your mother, she spent hours in the kitchen fixing dinner.”
• Your secret lover…when you’re alone, the bag of chips or half gallon of ice cream comforts you and feels like love.

Is food a reward?

• “If you get an A on your paper we’ll go out for ice cream.”
• “You were such a good girl at Grandma’s today! Here is a treat.”
• I lost three pounds! Time to celebrate.

Is food a punishment?

• “Finish your broccoli or you won’t get dessert.”
• “Don’t eat that, you will spoil your lunch.”
• I can’t believe I ate that whole pizza, I won’t eat anything tomorrow.

Is food comfort?

• “Don’t cry, here’s a cookie.”
• “I know you’re sad, let’s go get ice cream. That will make you feel better.”
• My boss is such a jerk! I deserve a burger.

Is food the enemy?

• “Finish your plate.”
• “How could you possibly be hungry? You just ate!”
• “I can’t believe I gained more weight: Starting tomorrow, I am fasting.” Or, “it doesn’t matter what I do anyway, might as well stuff myself!”

Our relationships with food have been short-circuited.

It’s no wonder we have a disordered relationship with food, hunger, and our bodies.

At Shaping Perspectives, we encourage Intuitive Eating.

Actually, we encourage thinking about food in an altogether different way.

We have given food lots of power.

Why?

Because we tell ourselves if we eat a certain way we will: lose weight, fit in, be happier, be noticed, be more successful, have a better life.

The truth is: You are not a one-size-fits-all person.

• Only you know when you are hungry and when you are full.
• Only you know what foods you like, and what you don’t.
• You and you alone—no one else.

This means you have a choice!

You can continue to have the same relationship with food, following someone else’s plan of eating (dieting), or you can begin to trust yourself.

If you make the choice to trust yourself with what, when and how much you eat….

We call this intuitive eating!

Intuitive eating is designed to help you turn down the volume of society’s thin ideal and dieting mentality, and…

Turn up the volume on tuning in to and trusting yourself!

Here’s how you can begin to eat intuitively and develop a happier, healthier relationship with food:

• Hear and trust your body’s unique internal signals for food and nourishment.
• Give your body the time it needs to trust that you will feed it and give it what it needs.
• Release old stories and beliefs around food and eating, and its connection to happiness, love, failure, or success.

You deserve to feel confident and empowered by trusting yourself and your body.

YOU ARE WORTH IT.

The choice is up to you.

I’d love to support you in your journey. Schedule a Complimentary Clarity Call today!

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