How to eat intuitively

What is Intuitive Eating and how to learn it? Get these five tips on how to enjoy your life healthy and without dieting.

What is Intuitive Eating?

Intuitive eating has the biggest goal to do GOOD to yourself and your body. The eating behavior is free of rules and without stress and pressure. You eat in connection with your body by listening to the signals like hunger and satiety.

Especially if you have tried a lot of diets and fought against your body for years, it can be difficult to eat mindful and intuitively at the beginning.

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How YOU can learn Intuitive Eating:

1. Understand your WHY

It is difficult to learn anything new in life and to make this change without having a clear motive or a goal.

Intuitive eating does not have the primary goal of achieving a thin body like the bodies from magazines (apart from the fact that even these bodies do not look like that in reality). It is about:
eating without stress and pressure,
to give your body what it needs
and to finally FEEL GOOD and creae a healthy body and mind.

How much energy, money and time have you already wasted to lose weight with any diets?
And how much has it brought you in the long run?

You have to be willing to let go of all your beliefs and dietary rules to change your eating habits in a sustainable way. To finally and forever learn how to eat mindful and work with your body instead of fighting against it.

2. Free yourself from diets and rules

Maybe you’ve heard it before: To prohibit something means that you want to do something even more. If you forbid a young child to do something, then it seems more interesting for the child and they will want to do it especially now.

The same goes for diets: if you forbid your body something, it will want it more than before and the next rule break or eating attack is not far away. The solution: to banish all rules completely. If you allow yourself everything, your craving for chocolate and co. will develop into a ‘normal and healthy’ behaviour after some time.

This is by no means easy and takes a lot of time, because since childhood you have been inciting false beliefs everywhere in the media and in society. All these beliefs are deeply rooted in your subconscious and can best be solved through mental training, meditations, and a lot of time. Some common beliefs:

• When I have lost weight, my life is wonderful.
• I have to be hungry to lose weight.
• Carbohydrates are bad.
• Fats are bad.
• Calories are bad.
• I may only 3x / 4x / 5x eat during the day.
• Only by counting my calories, I can achieve my dream weight.
• I’m not allowed to chocolate / cake / sugar.
• ….

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3. Learn to work with your body

Now your burning question is: how do you eat intuitively?

Remember back to your childhood or observe a small child. Back then, there were no rules (as long as your parents or society haven’t influenced you yet) and you just ate when you were hungry. And then stopped when you were full. It’s as simple as that. In theory.

In practice, as always, it is not that easy to completely change your habits and, after years of dieting, simply let go of everything. At first it is difficult to trust your body to 100% and not to follow any rules. Here, too, mental training can help you.
Here are a few suggestions on how to create intuitive eating habits in your life:

• Learn to recognize your real physical hunger.
• Allow yourself to eat when you are hungry, no matter when.
• Eat the foods your body needs right now (do you need something sweet, salty, hot, cold, light, strengthening, … ).
• Honor your food and be grateful for it.
• Learn to get rid of all the tension and stress while eating.
• Take breaks several times and connect with your body.
• Eat slowly, enjoy mindful and chew a lot.
• Learn to recognize when you are pleasantly full.
• Learn to stop eating as soon as you’re pleasantly full.
• Put down perfectionism (you can also enjoy a piece of cake at a party, even though you’re not hungry).

4. Self love

To respect, accept and also love yourself is the basis for Intuitive Eating. Because only if you accept yourself and your body, you can also learn to work together with him and listen to the signals of your body.

At the same time, of course, self-love is not taking a warm bath and doing a face mask on Sunday. That may be part of it, but true self-love is much deeper.

It’s about accepting everything in your life and taking responsibility for your future.
It’s about understanding that you are NOT your body.
It’s about standing up for yourself and saying NO sometimes.
It’s about not comparing yourself to others, but only to yourself from yesterday.

And don’t worry: You can love yourself and still want to change your body as a goal in the future!

Accept what is now, without compromise and create your future out of love for yourself the best way possible.

5. Understand, why you’re eating without hunger

If you have already started to adjust your eating habits to hunger and satiety, you will probably notice: sometimes you feel a strong need to eat even though you’re not physically hungry.

This phenomenon is called ’emotional eating’. It’s usually a pressure where you feel the need to eat something specific in this moment (e.g. chocolate).

You are absolutely allowed to eat chocolate! But often it is not about the chocolate, but about the feeling. For example, since you were a child, whenever you finished your homework, you got a chocolate as a reward. Even as an adult, your subconscious still associates chocolate with reward. That’s why you might reach for chocolate when you’re not feeling well and need something.

The problem: after a piece of chocolate, this urge to eat has not disappeared. Because the cause (i.e. your need for reward / true feelings of happiness) was not really fulfilled.

The point is to recognize why you have this urge to eat and how you can satisfy these needs and emotions without food.

You see, it’s about much more than ‘just’ improving your eating behavior. It’s about freeing yourself from your beliefs, living to your full potential and feeling more comfortable and confident in your life and in your body.

Above all, mental training, meditations, self-reflection and confidence will bring you to the long-term goal of eating and enjoying liberated and intuitively.

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PS: if you have more questions, feel free to contact me at my email address unterweger.lena@gmail.com . I have an open ear and always happy to help!