How Eating Intuitively Can Change Your Life

What if you could break free from the restraints of diet culture and eat the foods you want when you want them? Recommended by many dieticians, intuitive eating is a way to reclaim your relationship with food. Eating intuitively means letting your body take the reins instead of the latest fad diet, listening to your hunger and satiety cues and honoring your cravings. Read on to learn how intuitive eating can change your life.

A key component of intuitive eating is planning your diet around nutritional needs rather than your weight. In fact, many intuitive eaters choose to throw out their bathroom scales. Body acceptance isn’t required to eat intuitively, but they often go hand-in-hand. Once you learn to use food as fuel for your body instead of sorting it into “good” and “bad” categories, you also learn to love, nourish and accept your body as it is.

Whether it’s overeating and binging or restricting and starvation, many people have a dysfunctional relationship with food these days. Sometimes, a person has such a poor relationship with food that eating disorder treatment facilitiesare required to help them recover. However, if you learn to eat intuitively now and repair your disordered eating habits, you may be able to avoid inpatient treatment.

Year after year of yo-yo dieting can take a major toll on your health, resulting in consequenceslike muscle loss, hypertension, stress and net weight gain over time. The cycle of dieting and regaining may even be worse for your health than staying overweight. When you eat intuitively, you can ditch this cycle for good and focus on eating foods that contain the nutrients your body needs even if they are high in fat or calories.

Intuitive eating opens up a whole new world for your social life. No longer will you have to bring your meals to parties, skip your friend’s birthday cake or decline that delicious margarita for a glass of seltzer. Eating intuitively means having the freedom to embrace social gatherings, food and all.

Although eating intuitively offers self-esteem, health and freedom, it’s important to remember that it’s not a license to binge or have an unbalanced diet. Listening to hunger cues and knowing what your body needs to stay healthy are essential aspects of intuitive eating. Nutrition education and counseling to overcome disordered eating may be a necessary part of your journey.