So I mentioned in another post that I was going to some nutrition consultations at BYU to help me get back on track with eating and my weight. My consultant is a student at BYU named Genevieve, and she is quite awesome! I went in thinking I was going to have someone give me a feeding schedule of so many calories and I had to eat all-bran cereal with raisins on top (Yuck!). But she actually has approached it quite differently and I feel like it's been such a break through not only with eating but with other aspects of my life. She had me start reading this book called Intuitive Eating and it is AMAZING. Seriously, if you have desires to eat better or to change your relationship with food this is the book for you!
Ok, so I have gotten too far into yet but even just what I've read has really helped me step back and examine my relationship with food and society. The book is set up into 10 principles to help you step back and examine your relationship with food. Each principle is supposed to help you get to the point where you are eating intuitively for your body, NOT for the rules of society.
This book started because these two dieticians would have patients who, under their watch, would lose weight. But then after leaving their care would eventually gain it back. Their patients would be upset because they couldn't keep weight off no matter how hard they tried. They kept getting sucked back into the world of delicious food. So the dieticians decided to re-examine nutrition and how it went with dieting and eating. They came up with this idea about how our society has really ruined eating for us food lovers. You can only eat so many calories, carbs, grams of fat, etc. each day so that your body will be thinner. Except our bodies' cells are programmed for famines so when you go crazy after a week of dieting you binge and your cells cling to that delicious donut because they have no idea when they'll get another one.
This book brings back to us how to learn to intuitively eat for our body. It teaches about how it's ok to eat something you're craving, because in the long run it's healthier if you give into your craving for ice cream because you'll more than likely eat less when you allow yourself to eat what you want. If you've dieted you know exactly how it goes when you won't allow yourself to eat something. You automatically crave it like a crazy pregnant woman. You want it so bad that by the time you allow yourself to have it you eat at least twice of what probably actually wanted. And then you go lie on the floor and moan about how you'll never eat chocolate again (even though you know you'll binge on it again next week).
So... are you interested in what the principles are? I thought it would be helpful to me if I post about each one after I read about it so if you're interested in taking back your body from the food police (also known as the society we live in), then sit anxiously on the edge of your seat my friend for each post. I'll give you the principles below with their brief bios so you can get to know them before becoming friends with them.
1. Reject the diet mentality (this what I'm reading about now!)
Throw out the diet books and magazine articles that offer you false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently. 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
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 uncontrollable cravings and, often, binging. 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 minimal 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 fulness level?
6. Discover the satisfaction factor
In our fury to be thing and healthy, we often overlook one of the most basic gifts of existence-- the please 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 decided you've had "enough".
7. Honor your feelings without using food
Find ways to comfort, nurture, and resolve your issues without using food. Anxiety, loneliness, boredom, anger are emotions we all experience in 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 consistenly over time that matters. Progress not perfection is what counts.
Stay tuned!
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