1. Intuitive Eating

Understanding Intuitive Eating

Before we get into discussion about what will go on your plate, let’s first go through how to figure that out. Intuitive eating—what even is that? It’s not new, but it is somewhat new to popularity.

Intuitive eating is the idea that you are the expert of you and that when you let yourself guide yourself to eat what you want and when you want, you’ll do your best. It’s completely the opposite of traditional diets that tell you what to eat, when to do it, and how to do it. It’s revolutionary to think that you know better than professionals, but you do.

The Role of Mindfulness

So how do you do it? Intuitive eating is based on mindfulness, and mindfulness is something that has been popular for a while now where most people are somewhat familiar with it. It’s very simple: mindfulness is just paying attention rather than doing things all the time on autopilot. You instead choose consciously to focus in your presence and just be here for your life and your experiences. And it’s much harder than it seems because we’re kind of chemically programmed to have those autopilot settings; it’s something that our brains do just to help us get through life productively and functionally. So it takes a lot of work, as much as cooking, I would say, to really sit with and figure out what works for you.

What intuitive eating is based off of—mindfulness—really can change our eating habits. That’s because paying attention is so impactful in your world on every level. The more you pay attention to what’s going on, the more you’re going to be inspired to make what’s going on better for you, for those around you, and for the world.

Breaking Away from Dogma

Mindfulness, as far as it goes in relationship to eating, takes practice. It does not come immediately, but you can shift focus to start being aware immediately, and over time your instincts will have kicked in and beaten out your dogma and your preconceived notions. And we’ll get into what nutritional dogma is and how it has probably had an enormous impact on your life in a little while.

But first, we’re just going to kind of acknowledge that we don’t necessarily think about what we eat all the time when we’re doing it. We don’t necessarily give it the attention it deserves, but even more so, we don’t give food impacts on our body the attention it deserves. We are so caught up in finding these magic bullets that are going to make us feel everything’s fixed, so we instead rely on the outside world to help us find those, and then we are disappointed over and over when they don’t give us the results that we want. We don’t lose the weight we want to lose, or we don’t lose the inflammation we want, or we don’t get stronger when we work out because we’re listening to the outside world telling us what’s going to work for us.

Shifting Focus

So I’m encouraging you to just shift focus dramatically from here on out—hopefully forever—into the idea that you know what’s best for you. And what we need to do is not all the research to figure out what will work best for you, but help you get in touch with what all that “best for you” really is.