Feel good about food and your body, Without all the Guilt

Principle 1: Reject the Diet Mentality

The diet and weight loss industry make billions (yes, that’s a ‘b’) each year from convincing you that your body will be healthier, more attractive, more worthy of love and a whole line of other BS by buying their products. 

Perpetuating these lies keeps the dollars rolling in and keeps you believing that you have failed when the diet stops working or when you gain weight back. You keep hoping the next diet/plan/cleanse/reset/powder/pill/surgery will be the one that works for good. Then it doesn’t, leaving you searching for the next plan. 

STOP THIS MADNESS! 

Rejecting the diet mentality is what will give you true food and body freedom.

Principle 2: Honor Your Hunger

Eat adequately throughout the day. Ignoring hunger cues because it’s not “time” to eat or we “shouldn’t” be hungry can lead us to feeling ravenous. Making nutrition decisions in a “hangry” state leaves us open to making less desirable choices and episodes of overeating. Giving yourself adequate energy, carbs, proteins, and other nutrients when hunger signals begin helps you rebuild trust in your body’s inherent wisdom about what and how much to eat.

Principle 3: Make Peace with Food

Remove the rules about which foods are forbidden or allowed. When we tell ourselves a food is off limits, it becomes increasingly appealing, like the bad boy parents tell their teen not to date. We crave the forbidden food more, and when we have it, look out! We can’t get enough. We may feel out of control around that food or binge it, leaving us feeling shame and guilt. When we give up the food rules and call a truce, the forbidden foods have no power over us.

Principle 4: Challenge the Food Police

That feeling of satisfaction when you’ve eaten “right” and shame when you haven’t – that’s the Food Police blowing their proverbial whistles. These judgemental thoughts are not helping you respond to your body’s needs or eat with intuition. Questioning diet culture’s arbitrary rules is what principle 4 is all about, so that you can tune in to what really helps you feel your best.

Principle 5: Discover the Satisfaction Factor

Food that satisfies us sends off pleasure signals in our brains – an evolutionary adaptation that helps us seek out food to keep us alive. When we deny ourselves the foods that truly satisfy us because of diet culture messaging, we miss out on one of life’s most basic pleasures. Intuitive eating can help bring the joy and satisfaction back into eating. 

Principle 6: Feel Your Fullness

Dieting and restrictive eating practices disrupt the body’s natural signals for hunger and fullness. Intuitive eating helps you reestablish trust in your body’s ability to tell you when it has had enough. You can re-learn how to respond to fullness in a mindful way, so that eating until comfortably full becomes the norm.

Principle 7: Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness

Building skills for coping with difficult emotions, boredom, stress, or loneliness is part of pursuing a balanced life. If you have relied on food to soothe yourself when mad or anxious, you are not alone. Food can provide temporary relief or distraction, but often is not the long-term solution to the problem at hand. Becoming more attuned with your emotions and needs can be helpful to shift away from eating as a coping tool.

Principle 8: Respect Your Body

Recognize that your body is your “forever home” – it’s the only one you’ll ever have. Nourish it. Treat it with respect and kindness. Accept that your body’s size, like your height or shoe size, is determined largely by your genetics. Work towards a place of body acceptance so that you can reject the need to diet to change your body and truly feel better about who you are.