Intuitive Eating: Nourishing Body and Soul

In today’s fast-paced world, our relationship with food often becomes a constant battle between the desire to maintain a healthy diet and daily challenges. In this context, intuitive eating promotes not only nourishment for the body, but also reconnection with the internal signals that indicate when, what and how much to eat.

What is Intuitive Eating?

Intuitive eating is an approach to eating that is based on the ideal of listening to and responding to the body's physical signals regarding hunger and satiety, making your eating conscious and without overdoing it. Unlike restrictive diets, intuitive eating encourages meeting the individual's physical and psychological needs.

What are the fundamental principles?

Intuitive eating is a personal and dynamic process that includes 10 principles:

1. Reject the Diet Mentality: Current scientific evidence shows that restrictive diets driven by diet culture and beauty ideals lead to a greater disconnection from the body and a propensity to develop disordered eating behaviors.

2. Honor Hunger: Nourish your body with adequate energy and nutrients to avoid triggering uncontrolled eating urges. Learning to honor hunger rebuilds trust in yourself and food.

3. Make Peace with Food: Give yourself unconditional permission to eat, avoiding feelings of deprivation that can lead to uncontrolled eating behaviors. Eating favorite foods without restriction reduces feelings of guilt.

4. Defy the “Food Police”: Letting go of the idea of ​​“good” or “bad” foods is essential to reconnecting with feelings of hunger and fullness.

5. Honor satiety: Pay attention to your body's signals that indicate hunger and satiety. Taking breaks during meals, evaluating the taste of food and your level of hunger promotes a more conscious relationship with food.

6. Discover the Concept of "Satisfaction": Value the pleasure and satisfaction of eating. Prioritizing desired foods in a positive environment contributes to a more complete and peaceful eating experience.

7. Dealing with Emotions without Food: Find gentle ways to deal with your emotions, whether they are anxiety, loneliness or boredom, that do not rely on food as a solution. Food may help in the short term, but it will not solve the problem. To do this, you need to discover and learn to deal with the reason behind each emotion.

8. Respect Your Body: Accept and respect your body, free from unrealistic expectations about your desired weight and size. All bodies are worthy, and excessive criticism makes it harder to reject the diet mentality.

9. Practice physical exercise intuitively: Physical exercise should not be practiced with the intention of “burning calories”, but rather should be experienced fully and focused only on the sensations it transmits during and after exercise, such as greater energy and physical and psychological well-being.

10. Honor your health: Make food choices that honor your health, as you don’t need a perfect diet to be healthy. What matters is consistency over time, valuing progress over perfection.

As such, you should not restrict yourself from including foods that you like in your diet, but rather, try to respect your physical and psychological needs, always trying to honor your body, through intuitive eating.

Bibliographic references:

1. Tribole E and Resch E. Intuitive Eating, 2nd ed. (1995, 2003), NY:NY