5 Reasons why Intuitive Eating works for EveryBODY

[Disclaimer: This article is for informational and educational purposes only and is not a substitute for medical advice, mental health care or eating disorder treatment.]

Intuitive eating is not a diet. It is a way of eating that honours your body’s hunger and fullness signals, while bringing pleasure and enjoyment into your meals. There are no rules to intuitive eating. You basically eat foods that feel good in your body and that feel right in the moment. No foods are off limits.

I hear you loud and clear. “I can’t just eat whatever I want! All I am going to eat is chocolate and chips for the rest of my life! I need rules!” This was me about a year ago. The thought of eating foods that I restricted for so many years (or binged on in secret) scared me beyond belief. But about one year into intuitive eating, I have realized that I have never felt more empowered about the food choices I make. Today, I want to share 5 reasons why intuitive eating works for everyBODY.

1.You are able to live your life free of any obsession surrounding food and what food is going to do to your body

Does any of the following sound familiar to you? You wake up in the morning and this is the first thing on your mind. “Today, I am going to be good. I will follow my meal plan to a Tee and I won’t give in to any temptations.” 4 hours into your day and you start to feel hungry. “I am just going to order a salad for lunch, because I need to lose weight.” 1 hour after finishing your lunch, you find yourself scrolling through Instagram and admiring beautiful plates of food. You are wishing you could eat it without feeling guilty.

You tell yourself that this is all worth it because one day you will look perfect. When this day comes, you will loosen up your rules around food. (FYI, this day NEVER comes, because you will always want more.) Every now and then you “give in” and lose control around food. It all ends up in a binge or in over-eating. You tell yourself that this will be the last time you strayed from your meal plan. From now on you are going to be good again.

Intuitive eating will free you of the chains of your food rules. There will be no rules anymore and food will eventually lose its power over you.

2. You will figure out which foods truly work for you and which don’t (spoiler alert: gluten may not be as bad for you as you thought)

I restricted gluten for a number of years. Bread was my enemy. Even though I grew up in Europe eating bread 2-3 times a day, all of a sudden I convinced myself that it was very bad for my body. It went as far as my body actually rejecting bread, whenever I ate it. It was purely due to the stress I was putting myself under, which affected my stomach.

Now that I have embraced the “no food rules” philosophy, I am happily eating bread at least once a day and my tummy is absolutely fine with it. Sometimes I eat something that doesn’t sit very well, but I never beat myself up over it. It is just information that my body is sending to me. “Hey girl, this yogurt isn’t sitting very well with me, please ease up on the dairy for a bit, thanks.” I don’t attach any emotions to this stuff anymore and this truly allows me to tune in with my body.

I encourage you to give yourself a few months to truly figure out which foods work for you and which don’t. If you come from a background of dieting, chances are that your body might be sensitive to certain foods you have been restricting. The reason is simply that your body isn’t used to digesting these foods. Over time, your digestion will improve and you get a better idea.

3. You will be able to make empowered choices about foods and remove the labels you put on certain foods

Once you don’t consider yourself a good person when choosing a salad and a bad person when choosing cake, it changes everything. The only thing you will ask yourself before choosing a food is “does this sound good right now?” This is a HUGE mindset shift that empowers you every single day to choose foods that you truly want to eat and savour. Not foods that you think you SHOULD eat or SHOULDN’T eat. Feeling either proud (salad) or guilty (cake) when eating is something that will completely diminish over time. It is a wonderful feeling that I really want you to experience.

Instead of having food rule your life, you are now the boss of your life and food is only a small part of your amazing life. You deserve to go after what you truly want in life, without having food stop you. This is true empowerment right there. Trust me on this, your body WILL crave salads and vegetables naturally over time and it won’t feel like a chore to eat them. It will be liberating!

4. Intuitive eating was the only way of eating that helped in my eating disorder recovery

When I started my recovery journey, I was advised to not follow intuitive eating and stick to a meal plan. I agree with this general rule if you are coming from a background of anorexia, because your hunger signals might not be present at all. For me, however, coming from a background of orthorexia, bulimia and binge eating, a meal plan was very triggering. I felt that I HAD to stick to it and there was no wiggle room.

The only thing that did help me was embracing intuitive eating 6 months into recovery and slowly weaning myself off the food scale. Deleting food trackers, throwing out my exercise tracker and just going with the flow was the only thing that gave me ultimate freedom.

5. Intuitive eating is – in my opinion – the only way of eating that you can sustain for the rest of your life

Let’s be honest. Did you, at any point in your dieting past, think to yourself that you will be able to do this for the rest of your life? I never did. Every day, I held onto this magical day where I would finally be happy with my body. I even made plans on starting my intuitive eating journey, once I was happy with my body. The truth is that this day never came, because even at my smallest, I still didn’t feel good enough. The endless rules and restrictions rob us of many happy memories and nobody is able to sustain this lifestyle forever.

Ask yourself: Do I see myself eating the exact same way, 5 years, 10 years or even 30 years from now? The answer for me is, yes. I am able to eat like this for the rest of my life, because I don’t think about food all that much anymore. I eat when I get hungry and I usually stop when I am full. Sometimes I eat when I am not hungry. Like, when my coworker brings in cookies and I am not hungry, but feel like eating a cookie, I am going to eat it. And sometimes I am hungry but have no access to food straight away and that’s okay too.

Food is just not that big of a deal anymore, so I will happily eat like this for the rest of my life. I hope you will too.