3. How Food Makes You Feel

Now that we’ve done the work to release the dogma around what foods the world is telling us we should be eating, it’s time to talk about how to figure out how food makes you feel. It’s simple, but it’s something that most of us don’t do because we’re so caught up in eating the right foods; we don’t pay enough attention to what are those foods actually doing for our bodies.

I found that the people who pay the most attention to this are the ones who are forced to by illness. It’s something that I experienced as a person who spent about half a decade with two different chronic illnesses. You just can’t digest a lot when your body’s not working well, so you’re kind of forced to figure out what you can put in your body and what you can’t. For everyone else, we just kind of do our thing and we go about our life and we kind of hope for the best when it comes to how our food is making us feel, but we don’t really have any inspiration or need to pay attention to it.

The Purpose of a Food Diary

So this may be a little bit new for you. How you get in touch is a quicker process than how long it takes for intuitive eating to really take over your life. I’m someone who’s very opposed to food diaries at large. Even in my modeling days of an egg and a quarter of an avocado for a meal, I never weighed or measured or counted calories; I just sort of instinctively ate in a way that facilitated my having the size body I needed for the job I had at the time.

Beyond that, I think that when you add science to food as far as counting calories, weighing things out, you have zero chance of keeping the joy; I think that it takes the joy out of it. So when I say we’re going to talk about keeping track of what we eat and have a food diary briefly, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about facilitating intuitive eating and facilitating mindfulness around food. I do not at all encourage you to keep track of calories or quantities or anything else because the goal here with intuitive eating is that once you have yourself figured out, you’re just going to choose what’s best for you. And it doesn’t matter whether someone says that’s one cup of lean protein or 16 ounces of that; you’re gonna figure out what works best for you.

Tracking Ingredients and Feelings

So I do want you for a period of time to keep track of what you eat; it’ll help you discern what’s working for you. You want to track more things than you might think because ingredients like spices and additives can very much have an impact on how you feel if they don’t work for your body. So with each meal, you want to just jot down what it is you ate and a couple hours later you want to check in and jot down how you feel.

If there’s just no answer like, “I don’t feel anything at all,” that’s great. That’s food that’s working well enough for you that there’s no response; there’s nothing wrong with that. However, quite often we either feel particularly energized and good after a meal, or we feel crappy. We’re tired, we’re bloated, we’re gassy, we’re uncomfortable in assorted ways. We may have inflammation. This is where you learn what foods work for your body.

The only downside of this is the fact that bodies change over time, so this isn’t a forever exercise where once you’ve done it you know henceforth for the rest of your life what’s going to work for you. However, you know for now and you got the process, and once you have it it’s way easier to keep hold of. This food diary is something that is in my wellness book, How to Be Well When You’re Not, and I go into a lot more obviously than just this little bit.

Duration and Consistency

But I do believe that this little bit is completely sufficient to help you get started. You don’t need—you don’t need to do anything beyond this, but you do need to do this faithfully for a short amount of time. I encourage people to keep a food diary for about a week.

If you are someone who is already super in touch with how everything affects you and you’re the hyper-aware type, three or four days might do it. If you’re someone who has a busier life or a more forgetful life and you only manage to check in and jot down ingredients and feelings about half your meals, it might be a better project to do over the course of a couple weeks or even a month. There’s no right or wrong here and that’s kind of the point. You’re the person who’s going to decide right and wrong, and you’re not even going to do that; you’re going to decide better for you or maybe not a fit.

Challenging Nutritional Dogma

And that’s a better way of looking at things because it removes the dogma. And it can be surprising. One thing that I’ve discovered in working with people who have health ailments is that the foods prescribed for assorted ailments are often the ones that are the hardest to digest when you have those ailments.

We’re going to get into vegetables later and why they can be so difficult and how you can make them easier on your body, but we think of vegetables as this panacea that’s just going to fix everything and that we need to fill our plates with. But if you’re experiencing anything—even if you’re just experiencing stress when you eat—and you’re inhibiting the digestion process, vegetables require so much because they’re fiber. It’s something that is good for you because it doesn’t break down; it just travels and it needs a lot of blood and a lot of help from your body to do that. The actual extraction of nutrients in your intestines is something your body really needs the space for, it really needs the blood for.

Building Your “Yes” List

So in this process of figuring out what works for you, the most important thing is simply that you’re going to pay attention. You’re going to eat, write down, “This is what I had,” this is the list of it, and then about two hours later—which is long enough that your body has basically moved past having the food in your stomach and it is now in your intestines and has traveled along far enough that you should know how it affects you—you’re gonna write down, “This is how I feel.”

And again, if you feel nothing, that’s fine. If you’re going to figure out pretty quickly that some things don’t necessarily work for you and other things work really well, and once you know that, that becomes your foundation. Your new diet is simply everything on your “yes” list, and your new diet’s restrictions are just everything on your “that made me feel not great” list. It’s a little bit of a pain to begin with, but I promise you that this short exercise of just a few minutes a day has the ability to completely change your food life and your wellness.