Intuitive Eating

How fascinating! To know what our body requires and fulfil it accordingly by incorporating intuitive eating daily by planning accordingly. Intuitive eating is nothing but eating the food which is required and desired in optimal amounts to reach our body’s requirement to maintain a healthy life. It‘s not a weight loss or weight gain eating.  

These are principles of eating the food and mastering your own body and its appetite provoking signals. Certainly, it is a contrast to a traditional diet and doesn’t shatter you in thinking about what to eat and what not to eat. It reflects that you’re the only person good at making choices to eat the food.

This is a style of eating, which encourages fit point of you on body image and food. The theme is to eat food when you're hungry and stop eating when you’re full, it is called an intuitive process. But, many people don’t follow it and eat excessively without being in control. By reading a few books and having certain plans can make you drive away from intuitive eating. Firstly, you must know the difference between physical hunger and emotional hunger.

Physical Hunger: This is a natural involuntary urge to eat food and satisfy the energy levels in the body and it gives signals like triggering in stomach walls, headache, loss of concentration and sounds from the stomach. The stomach muscle contractions caused the production of ghrelin hormone. When the urge is fulfilled, the following disturbances or signals stop.

Emotional Hunger: This type of hunger also arises due to emotional disturbance, like feeling sad, stressed, depressed and joyful can elevate the feelings of hunger. Atlas ends up feeling self-hatred. Here, people consume the food more than the required amount to satisfy their taste buds and elevate their mood. 

Principles to Initiate Intuitive Eating

1. Diet Mentally: Locking the thoughts of food which is good or bad, instead, giving access to food which you feel is right and good. Actually, intuitive eating follows an anti-diet slogan. Forgetting the concepts of diet, which you think to work on you.

2. Respect Hunger: Satisfy the hunger, when it signals out by creating stomach contractions and sounds. If you’re more hungry and then you will be more likely to have more food, just respect it.

3. Peace With Food: Make peace with your food, don’t think about what to eat and what not to eat. Go with the flow and enjoy all categories of food which makes you satisfied, but don't restrict yourself in ingesting the favourite food in an illusion that it makes you fat.

4. Challenge: It's an emotional declaration to stop thinking about whether the food is good or bad. Don’t self doubt yourself that if you eat a certain food you're bad? Challenge the mind in restricting the above doubts when eating the food.

5. Accept the Fullness: As you have responded with the feeling of hunger, similarly accept the fullness of your stomach. Don't put yourself under strain by consuming more food. Always “LISTEN TO YOUR BODY”. Examine the stomach by yourself and notify the mind by replying to it.

6. Invent the food, which makes you feel happy and satisfied. If you eat enjoyable and delicious food, you're more likely to have less food. So, don’t think about the calories, just go with the food which allures you the most. 

7. Respect your feelings and don't consider eating too much when you feel low. Instead, go for a walk or jog, do yoga, meditate, paint, music, dance and talk to a friend. Forget the feeling of depression or stress by indulging in physical activities.

8. Honour your body, however, it is. Don’t go with specific sizes and shapes, just fit your soul in the body which you’ve acquired and been comfortable and happy in it. Being healthy is more significant than being slim or thin.

9. Instead of following certain structured exercise regimes which make you feel disinterested, just move your body which makes you feel more interested, enjoyable, youthful and refreshed. 

10. Food which you eat, should taste good and be loaded with nutrition for fine nourishment of the body. For a healthy body, nutrition is required to maintain normal physiological functions, so, we should consider eating food that is deliciously nutritious to meet the requirement of the body and include it in breakfast, lunch and dinner.

11. Recent studies have found that by initiating intuitive eating one can maintain lower BMI and improved psychological behaviour like less depression and anxiety. It also has shown that women who implemented intuitive eating are less likely to have eating disorders.

Take Away

The norm of intuitive eating is, it's significant to check what you eat and how you eat. By following these guidelines mentioned above one can improve the quality of life and body image.