10 Principles of Intuitive Eating

[Guest guest]

1. Reject the Diet Mentality Throw out the diet books and magazine articles that

offer you false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently. Get

angry at the lies that have led you to feel as if you were a failure every time

a new diet stopped working and you gained back all of the weight. If you allow

even one small hope to linger that a new and better diet might be lurking around

the corner, it will prevent you from being free to rediscover Intuitive Eating.

2. Honor Your Hunger 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

signal sets the stage for re-building trust with yourself and food.

3. Make Peace with Food Call a truce, stop the food fight! 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 food, eating will be experienced with such

intensity, it usually results in Last Supper overeating, and overwhelming guilt.

4. Challenge the Food Police .Scream a loud " NO " to thoughts in your head that

declare you're " good " for eating under 1000 calories or " bad " because you ate a

piece of chocolate cake. The Food Police monitor the unreasonable rules that

dieting has created . The police station is housed deep in your psyche, and its

loud speaker shouts negative barbs, hopeless phrases, and guilt-provoking

indictments. Chasing the Food Police away is a critical step in returning to

Intuitive Eating.

5. Respect Your Fullness Listen for the body signals that tell you that you are

no longer hungry. Observe the signs that show that you're comfortably full.

Pause in the middle of a meal or food and ask yourself how the food tastes, and

what is your current fullness level?

6. Discover the Satisfaction Factor The Japanese have the wisdom to promote

pleasure as one of their goals of healthy living In our fury to be thin and

healthy, we often overlook one of the most basic gifts of existence–the pleasure

and satisfaction that can be found in the eating experience. When you eat what

you really want, in an environment that is inviting and conducive, the pleasure

you derive will be a powerful force in helping you feel satisfied and content.

By providing this experience for yourself, you will find that it takes much less

food to decide you've had " enough " .

7. Honor Your Feelings Without Using Food Find ways to comfort , nurture,

distract, and resolve your issues without using food. Anxiety, loneliness,

boredom, anger are emotions we all experience throughout life. Each has its own

trigger, and each has its own appeasement. Food won't fix any of these feelings.

It may comfort for the short term, distract from the pain, or even numb you into

a food hangover. But food won't solve the problem. If anything, eating for an

emotional hunger will only make you feel worse in the long run. You'll

ultimately have to deal with the source of the emotion, as well as the

discomfort of overeating.

8. Respect Your Body 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 as futile (and uncomfortable) to have the same expectation with body

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

It's hard to reject the diet mentality if you are unrealistic and overly

critical about your body shape.

9. Exercise–Feel the Difference 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 rolling out

of bed for a brisk morning walk or hitting the snooze alarm. If when you wake

up, your only goal is to lose weight, it's usually not a motivating factor in

that moment of time.

10 Honor Your Health–Gentle Nutrition Make food choices that honor your health

and tastebuds while making you feel well. Remember that you don't have to eat a

perfect diet to be healthy. You will not suddenly get a nutrient deficiency or

gain weight from one snack, one meal, or one day of eating. It's what you eat

consistently over time that matters, progress not perfection is what counts.

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> > What book are you going through? Is it a twelve step?

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> > Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

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> > Respect your body

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> > I am on the step about respecting your body now- although I know I still

need lots of study/thinking about the others. What were your experiences on

respecting your body? The wearing comfortable clothes and underwear struck home

with me. I tend to keep a size even though I know the waist is too tight to be

comfortable in and wear bras a cup size too small because DD bothers me so much.

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