Eating Intuitively

There’s a fair bit of press about Intuitive Eating, a movement with a non-diet approach. Most people who ask me about it have been on an endless list of diets, are tired of battling intrusive thoughts about food, and are looking for a new relationship with food. So… if you were interested in learning about your own eating intuition, where would you begin?

Lets start with what the word ‘intuitive’ means. Intuitive implies instinctive! It involves making a decision based on our internal feelings or cues without having a conscious reason to do it. So how would we apply this to eating?

Having worked with children, adolescents, adults and elderly patients, I’ve seen the gamut when it comes to eating behaviours. I can tell you that our bodies, our eating patterns, and our appetite change with age. What is right for one person will vary for another because we are living at different phases of our lives, with different backgrounds, genetics, health conditions, and environments. This means that what works for your friend or your mother or your brother, may NOT work for you. It is unique and applies to your body only.

A lot of people have a difficult time recognising their hunger and fullness cues. However, it wasn’t always this way. Once upon a time as a newborn, you cried when you were hungry and stopped when you were full. Over time, we learned to regulate our needs based on internal feelings and our environment around us. Sometimes our environment, our caregivers, our internal hormonal changes created challenges for us to engage instinctively with this hunger/fullness regulation. Examples can include caregivers which may have encouraged you to ‘clean your plate’ or placed children on diets, living with food insecurity, hormonal changes in health conditions such as Obesity, frequent dieting which can suppress these instinctive cues, difficulty recognising internal cues in general such as in autism spectrum disorders, difficulty regulating emotional needs, and the list goes on.

If any of this sounds relatable, then lets start with some tips for adding structure into your life.

The best way to ensure we can recognise hunger cues is to practice eating at consistent times daily and not going more than 5 hours between meals. To keep blood sugar levels steady, some people like snacks between meals. Everyone is different. Some people need to eat a snack every 2-3 hours, whereas others may feel comfortable going 3-4 hours before a snack.

Why does this work? Every cell in your body has a time clock. It regulates its daily rhythms based on when you eat, sleep, and perform activity. Eating is a crucial part of the body’s ability to regulate itself for daily activities. When you eat, sugar and other nutrients enter your blood stream and feed the cells of your body. When you feed your body at the same times every day, your body develops a more regulated schedule and learns to expect food at these times. Your hormone levels will adjust accordingly and you will begin to notice hunger and fullness cues more regularly and with more ease.

How might this look? For most people, this would be a breakfast within an hour of rising, midday meal 5 hours later, and a dinner 5 hours after that. (For example: Breakfast at 8am, Lunch at 1pm, and Dinner at 6pm). In between meals, a small snack can help you reach the next meal without feeling overly hungry.

Once you have stability with eating, lets look at re-acquainting yourself with your instinctive need to eat.

Start by thinking about other daily needs…. such as your need to pee. Often we can feel this sensation growing, an urgency developing the longer we go without peeing. Pretty soon your dancing around, desperate to find a toilet, and then sweet relief afterwards. Hunger is no different. It happens frequently throughout the day and can give small cues before you feel the strong urge to ‘eat everything in sight’. For some people it begins with low energy, difficulty concentrating, gurgling stomach, an empty stomach sensation….and then progresses to irritability, light headedness, and a feeling most people classify as ‘starving’.

Try to give your hunger a scale of 1-5. At 1, we aren’t hungry. We could go several more hours without food. At 5, we are starving and need immediate food intake. We should comfortably be about a 4 before a meal, and a 2 after a meal.

Then think about fullness versus satisfaction. Many times we eat something and it fills us. We no longer feel hungry, but it may not have been a meal we enjoyed. Try seeing how food feels in your body by checking in after a meal to rate your fullness and satisfaction levels. This will help you recognize what combinations of food feel the best in your body and learn about portion sizes your needs.

Its sounds too easy, right? To be honest, thats the point. There is no need to follow complicated feeding and fasting schedules or point based programmes. You’re body instinctively knows when, how much, and what to eat. We just stopped trusting this ability over time as we tried to manipulate our bodies to do low calorie diets, work more hours, sleep less, and the myriad of other impossible tasks we request our bodies to do in the name of societal pressure.

For those of you looking for more info on Intuitive Eating, I suggest the book. Intuitive Eating started as a book published by two Dietitians Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch. Its a book aimed at helping people stop dieting and find a healthier relationship with food. They use a 10 principle approach to examine the drivers of eating behaviours and help people re-connect with their hunger and fullness cues. The book is available along with their personalized guides and tips if you want further reading about the movement. Its a good one for helping people learn more about body attunement and gentle nutrition.

If you feel like you may need help working with your relationship with food, or may have other environmental or health factors which make this challenging, then I suggest working with a psychologist and Registered Dietitian who specialize in eating behaviours. They provide more individualized support based on your needs.