Intuitive eating is an approach to health and food that has nothing to do with diets, meal plans, discipline or willpower.

It’s a personal process of honoring your health by paying attention to the messages of your body and meeting your physical and emotional needs.

Learning to become an intuitive eater is learning to get in touch with your body cues (aka your intuition) like hunger, fullness and satisfaction, while learning to trust your body around food again!

You’re the expert of your body and the boss of you and only YOU can feel if something supports your health or not.

My mission is to teach you to become a master of YOU so you don’t have to rely on external cues such as confusing nutrition information, fad diets, new trends, cultural habits, specific time to eat anymore.

The first step towards eating intuitively is to now the 10 principles of intuitive eating. These 10 principles work in 2 key ways:

• Some help you gain body attunement (aka ability to hear the physical sensations that arise in your body such as hunger and fullness)
• Other principles work by removing the obstacles to body attunement

Being attuned to the physical sensations of your body gives you powerful information into your physiological and psychological state, which helps you determine what you should do to meet your needs.

Perhaps you need to sleep, maybe you need to eat or play , or you just need a break. Your body knows! This information is ALWAYS available to you, you just need to listen and pay attention to your body to find out what you need.

1️⃣ Reject the diet mentality 🙅‍♀️

Pause for a second and ask yourself: has dieting and focusing on weight loss ever gotten you the results you wanted? How did that impact your mind and body? Have you ever felt like a failure after falling off a specific diet? Do you find yourself thinking that you don’t know how to eat anymore? Guuurl, you don’t lack willpower, you are not a failure, it’s the system of dieting that is the problem! The society we live in constantly promotes new diets and generates false hope that there is a magical diet out there that will provide you with quick and easy weight loss, but the truth is that it doesn’t. Today you must let go of this idea if you want to break free and find inner peace and heal your relationship to food.

ACTION STEP: unfollow any accounts that promote calorie counting, diets or weight loss and instead follow accounts that share positive food and health message, mine is @ines_schubi 

2️⃣ Honor your hunger 🙌

Hunger is a normal & essential biological process that is here to indicate you to put food in your tank to have energy and go accomplish all the amazing things you want to do. Your body needs to know, and trust, that it consistently will have access to food. When you don’t honor your hunger by restricting your calories and carbohydrates, your body starts to rebel against you and that’s when cravings and binges happen. Plus, I’m sure you’ve noticed that when you are ravenously hungry, all intentions of moderate, conscious eating are gone and you could eat ANYTHING! Learning to honor the first biological signal of hunger allows you to rebuild trust with yourself and food.

ACTION STEP: Use the hunger scale below to get started with honoring your hunger. 

3️⃣ Make peace with food 

Call a truce-stop the food fight! Give yourself unconditional permission to eat ALL the foods, everything that you want! Stop categorizing foods as “good” of “bad”. If you tell yourself that you can’t or shouldn’t have a particular food, it will lead to intense feelings of deprivation that build into uncontrollable cravings and often bingeing, since you don’t know when you’ll be able to have it again.

ACTION STEP: when you feel like you shouldn’t eat a certain food, take a deep breath, and check in with your hunger levels with the scale above, if you’re hungry eat the food and if you’re not, keep on reading to figure out what to do.

4️⃣ Challenge the food police 

The food police monitor the unreasonable rules that dieting has created. It’s the voices in your head that consider you as “good” for eating a salad for lunch and “bad” because you ate dessert. The food police is housed deep in your psyche because of the society we grow up in that constantly promotes dieting. You know it’s deeply ingrained when these thoughts govern your daily food decision and makes you feel guilty around food. It’s impossible to view eating as a normal & pleasurable experience when the food police are around. 

ACTION STEP: From now on, consider all food equal, let go of the labels “good” and “bad”

5️⃣ Feel your fullness ✨ 

Dieting makes us feel like we “have” to eat at specific times or that leaving food behind is not ok. Only you know when you are full, not the serving size of a restaurant plate or the clock. Listen for your body signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry. Observe the signs that show that you’re comfortably full.

ACTION STEP: Pause in the middle of eating and ask yourself how the food tastes and what your current fullness level is with the scale I shared above.

6️⃣ Discover your satisfaction factor 😋

The Japanese have the wisdom to promote pleasure as one of their goals of healthy living. In the quest of being thin and healthy, we often overlook one of the most basic gifts of existence: the pleasure and satisfaction of eating.
Because yes it’s possible to be physically full but not satisfied. When you eat what you really want, in an environment that is inviting and relaxing, the pleasure you’ll get will be multiplied and you’ll 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.

ACTION STEP: journal about what food satisfies you, what flavor, texture, taste…

7️⃣ Cope with your emotions without using food 

Find ways to comfort, nurture, distract and resolve your issues without using food. Anxiety, loneliness, boredom and 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. Figuring out what your triggers are and addressing the root of the emotion is an important part of intuitive eating, and that is what I help my clients do.

ACTION STEP: Next time you find yourself triggered to eat without physiological hunger, put on your detective hat and be curious to find out what emotion triggered it. One time, I found myself wanted something sweet but was not physically hungry , once I checked in with my body I found out I was just very tired. I took a nap and the craving was gone as I address the real issue.

8️⃣ 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 your body size. But mostly, respect your body, so you can feel better about who you are now. It’s hard to reject the diet mentality if you are unrealistic and overly critical about your body shape.

ACTION STEP: Instead of focusing on what you don’t like about your body when you look in the mirror, focus on one thing you like about your body and be grateful for it!

9️⃣ Exercise: feel the difference 🤸

Shift your focus to how it feels to move your body, rather than the calorie-burning effect of exercise. Get active because it makes you feel good, makes you in a better mood, allows you to sleep better not because you “should” and feel the difference. If when you wake up, the only reason you exercise is to lose weight, it’s usually not a motivating factor in that moment in time and you’ll be more likely to hit the snooze button. But if instead you decide to go on a brisk walk in the morning because you notice that it energizes you and you are feeling much more productive during the day so much so that you have extra time to spend with your loved-ones, then you’ll jump out of bed every morning!

ACTION STEP: journal what kind of exercise makes your happy, something you see yourself doing it on a regular basis and that you truly enjoy doing now!

🔟 Honor your health with gentle nutrition 

Make food choices that honor your health and taste buds 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.

ACTION STEP: After a meal check in with your body and see how it feels? Do you like this feeling? Were there any ill effects such as bloating, excessive gas, headache, stomachache from this meal? Did you feel more energy after eating?

I truly hope that these 10 principles have been able to open up some internal discussions. Being aware of these is the first step to becoming an intuitive eater. Knowledge is power but only action will take you through the transformation. Your second step towards becoming an intuitive eater is to actually put them into practice.