Intuitive eating

To eat intuitively, you may need to relearn how to trust your body. Distinguish between physical and emotional hunger:

• Physical hunger. This biological urge tells you to replenish nutrients. It builds gradually and has different signals, such as a growling stomach, fatigue, or irritability. 
• Emotional hunger. This is driven by emotional need. Sadness, loneliness, and boredom are some of the feelings that can create cravings for food, often comfort foods. 

Some of the concepts of intuitive eating have been around at least since the early 1970s, though the term wasn’t coined until 1995.

The program was built on the principle that diets don’t work and that lifestyle changes and personal care are more important for long-term health.

Recognize and silence your inner critic.

An example of your inner food police: if you're scanning a restaurant menu and you catch yourself saying "That’s not healthy. That’s too many servings. That’s too high fat, " that voice is not yours, although it feels like it. It's only fueled by external messaging.

Food isn’t good or bad. Don't fall for this 'black or white' way of thinking.

Health and nutrition exist on a gradient. Keeping your health in mind when making food choices is totally in line with intuitive eating, but being rigid about healthy eating isn’t.

With mindful eating, there is no explicit rejection of dieting. 

Intuitive eating rejects the diet mentality altogether—that’s the biggest difference.

• Honor your hunger. Reject the diet mentality, make peace with food and challenge the food police.
• The act of eating. Respect your fullness, and discover the food delight factor.
• The emotion of eating. Honor your feelings without using food, and respect your body.
• Exercise—feel the difference.
• Honor your health.
  

Eat a sufficient amount of calories and carbohydrates to keep your body “fed” and satiated. Once you learn to recognize these signals in your own body, it becomes much easier to trust your instincts and repair unhealthy relationships with food.

Give yourself “unconditional permission to eat.”

People realize they don’t really want that food that was forbidden before; they just got caught up in society telling them they couldn’t have it.

• It does not approve the diet culture.
• It respects all body shapes and sizes.
• It helps you recognize your body’s cues for hunger and fullness.
• It helps you evaluate habits you want to change, but without policing food.
• It helps you liberate from food’s control.
• It makes you see food as fuel rather than filler.

• It makes your day simpler: fewer meals= less stressing about what you'll eat.
• It helps you live longer: you get the benefits of a longer life without the hassle of starving.
• Still up for debate, but intermittent fasting may reduce the risk of cancer.
• It is much easier than dieting, once you get over the idea that you need to eat all the time.

• Daily Intermittent Fasting: 16–hour fast followed by an 8–hour eating period. 
• Weekly Intermittent Fasting: One of the best ways to get started with it - do it once per week.
• Alternate Day Intermittent Fasting: incorporates longer fasting periods on alternating days throughout the week.

• GIP and GLP-1 are responsible for stimulating the production of insulin to regulate the metabolism of carbohydrates.
• Other hormones are involved in slowing down the movement of food through the stomach.
• CKK and PYY are vital in reducing the feeling of hunger. (Increased PYY causes a loss of appetite and is particularly high in patients who have a gastric band fitted to reduce the size of the stomach.)

Even though your stomach has a hormonal system for telling your brain it is empty, it can also raise your hunger levels at specific times by learned associations, even if you had a large meal.

If you repeatedly eat chocolate after dinner when you sit on the couch, your body can start to associate sitting on the couch with eating, and you'll experience a craving.

The brain’s response to caloric restriction tends to be to increase cravings for foods that are highly rewarding and reducing our perception of being full. 

Diets frequently fail because they have an endpoint and are not a real lifestyle change. Maintaining a lifestyle that promotes a healthy weight and metabolism is often a lifelong journey. 

The actual food you eat isn’t the main thing that enables you to keep weight off.

Maintaining a weight-reduced state is a lifelong journey and many dietary approaches can work to facilitate weight loss and keep it off.

Cardio doesn't always necessarily lead to excess hunger or binging.

Some people are more sensitive to large quantities of cardio and are more binge-prone than others. Reducing the amount of cardio lessens the urge to binge or makes it disappear altogether.

Binge eaters tend to aggressively cut calories while leaning on willpower to deal with hunger and lack of energy. 

But willpower is limited, so this strategy will backfire.

• Salivary response: the more a food causes you to salivate, the more it will cover your taste buds.
• Rapid food meltdown: this tells your brain that you’re not full, even though you’re eating a lot of calories.
• Calorie density. junk foods are designed to convince your brain that it is getting nutrition, but to not fill you up.
• Memories of past eating experiences: When you eat something tasty, your brain registers that feeling and will bring it up in the future.

Most people think that building better habits or changing your actions is all about willpower or motivation. But your environment has an incredible ability to shape your behavior.

Nowhere is this more true than with food.