Intuitive Eating Lets You Feel Your Fullness

The food police monitor the unreasonable rules that diet culture 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 Intu...

Accept your genetic blueprint. Just as a person with a shoe size of eight would not expect to realistically squeeze into a size six, it is equally futile (and uncomfortable) to have a similar expectation about body size.

But mostly, respect your body so you can feel better about who you ar...

• Throw out the diet books and magazine articles that offer you the false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently.
• Get angry at diet culture that promotes weight loss and the lies that have led you to feel as if you were a failure every time a new diet stopped working a...

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 this first biological sig...

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 foods, eatin...

• Recognize that food restriction, both physically and mentally, can, in and of itself, trigger loss of control, which can feel like emotional eating. Find kind ways to comfort, nurture, distract, and resolve your issues.
• Anxiety, loneliness, boredom, and anger are emotions we all exp...

Make food choices that honor your health and taste buds while making you feel good. Remember that you don’t have to eat perfectly to be healthy.

You will not suddenly get a nutrient deficiency or become unhealthy, from one snack, one meal, or one day of eating. It’s what you eat consis...

Forget militant exercise. Just get active and feel the difference. Shift your focus to how it feels to move your body, rather than the calorie-burning effect of exercise.

If you focus on how you feel from working out, such as energized, it can make the difference between r...