4. What Food Works For You

The best part of intuitive eating after the food journal ties back into what makes you the least stressed when it comes to food. It’s getting in touch with your body just like the food diary where you’re figuring out what works for you. But it’s getting in touch in relation to everything outside of your digestion: what your mind, body, and spirit need. Now, this isn’t something that you’d have to worry about if we were just talking about most other daily functions—I don’t have to encourage you to get in touch with your larger spiritual needs to go to the bathroom, for example.

But as I’ve mentioned, food is this joyful—or at least food has the ability to be this joyful, wonderful, rewarding, fabulous part of our lives. So I’m here to help you figure out how to make it that the most. And I want to encourage you, when you’re looking to plan your meals and you’re looking to plan what you eat, to have a two-part focus.

Two-Part Focus for Meal Planning

One of them is on—one of your focuses is on—what foods are working best for my body right now? You know that based on the food diary that you kept, and you use that as your main inspiration and basis for the meals that you decide.

Also, though, you want to think about nourishment on a deeper level because that’s part of the satiation; that’s part of the experience. We can’t remove food from and our eating habits from all of the things that we associate with them culturally, so we might as well instead just lean into it and say, “Okay, how can I make this the best experience for me and my body and my mind and my spirit?” And that again ties back to what makes you the happiest—where if you prefer to eat with a friend and one isn’t accessible, you can go ahead and FaceTime them.

Understanding Preferences

But it’s also about the stimulation factors. Some people—of all the dietary choices and preferences I’ve come across—some people and their aversion to gooey foods would be the top one: yogurt, Jell-O, pudding. That’s like the number one thing that when I ask people what they like and what they don’t like, they tell me they don’t like that texture. It’s important to know what we like and what we don’t like, and it’s important to keep focus on that and to really delve into the experiences of what we like.

I am someone—and I bring that up specifically because that’s one of my favorite things, yogurts and puddings—I love soft, spoonable food. Other people want everything crunchy and rock hard. If I’m going to eat bread, I want it fresh and soft; other people want a dry piece of toast that’s crunchy. Everyone has their innate preferences. So you really want to remember what yours are and you want to think about how you can satisfy them seasonally.

Seasonal Instincts and Cultural Life

And I’m someone who lives in Los Angeles where we marginally barely have seasons; I still, regardless of the fact that it might be 80 degrees out in January, will get requests from clients for hearty soups and stews because body memory says, “January, let’s eat warming foods”. Our instincts are so powerful and our preferences are so powerful, and I want to encourage you not to keep denying them like we’re trained to do, but to delve into them and to really think about: what are the tastes you enjoy? What are the textures you enjoy? What are the emotional elements of food that you find the most satisfying?

For me, a love for puddings and yogurts and that sort of thing—I just make a point of having those as my snacks sometimes. It doesn’t have to be complicated. For people who like dry and crunchy, you might want to have crackers on hand more often, or nuts; either of which may be the thing that works for your body or doesn’t. That’s for you.

Choosing Joy Over Guilt

But because food is such a huge part of our cultural life, it only can serve us the best to make it the most joyful part of our own lives. So when you think about what you want and you’re making that grocery list, don’t just think about, “Oh, this vegetable for this thing” and “This is an easy one to cook,” but let yourself really have a more childlike sense of what will bring me joy. Whether that’s a super nutritious thing or a non-nutritious thing, all of it has a place.

Eating something with joy produces joyful chemicals in your brain; therefore, it was a success. There’s no reason to eat something that’s non-nutritive and joy-based without that joy. You’re not accomplishing anything at all if you’re just like, “Oh no, I’m craving this thing. I broke down; I ate it. Now I have to feel guilty”. You’re not serving anyone.

When I first started eating meat, I didn’t want to eat it out because I wanted it to be as well sourced as possible. So I purchased it and I cooked it, and I didn’t let myself season it because I didn’t want to be able to enjoy it. It was my body that was suddenly craving it, so for the first month or so I just cooked chicken or beef plain, baked in the oven, because my body wanted it but I didn’t want to enjoy it because I had so much guilt around eating animal products.

All of my friends very quickly told me that I was being completely insane and cruel to myself, and they were right. And ever since, I season protein just like I season everything else and I make wonderful, delicious food that my body deserves to eat and my brain deserves to eat. We take things from ourselves because we have this weird martyr complex that it’s going to make us a better person to suffer for our nutrition. But I’m here to tell you that’s not the case. You’re going to be the best version of you you can be by eating the foods that you choose with the most amount of joy.