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Throw out those diet books and shiny magazines that offer you the false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently. It’s time to get angry at diet culture and its promotion of weight loss, the lies that have led you to feel you’re a failure every time a new diet has stopped working, or you’ve gained back all the weight. If you allow even one small hope to linger that a new or better diet may be lurking around the corner, it will prevent you from being free to rediscover Intuitive Eating (Resch & Tribole, 2021).
When hunger calls, keep your body biologically fed with sufficient energy and carbohydrates, lest the primal drive to overeat comes knocking at your door! Once you pass your threshold and reach excessive hunger levels, all intentions of moderate and conscious eating become obsolete. Learning to honour your biological signals sets the stage for rebuilding trust in yourself and in food (Resch & Tribole, 2021).
Give yourself unconditional permission to eat. Telling yourself that you can’t or shouldn’t have a particular food leads to intense feelings of deprivation, which in turn build into uncontrollable cravings (and even binge-eating). When you finally ‘give in’ to your forbidden foods, eating will be experienced with such intensity it usually results in ‘Last Supper’ over-eating and overwhelming guilt. Time to call a truce and stop the food fight (Resch & Tribole, 2021).
Let’s shout a collective “Heeeeeell Nah” to those thoughts in your head that declare you’re ‘good’ for eating minimal calories and ‘bad’ because you ate a piece of chocolate cake. Your internal food police monitor the unreasonable rules that diet culture has created, and it’s time to take a stand. The police station is housed deep in your psyche, and its loudspeaker shouts negative barbs, hopeless phrases, and guilt-provoking indictments. Chasing the food police away is a critical step in returning to Intuitive Eating (Resch & Tribole, 2021).
In order to honour your fullness, you need to trust that you will give yourself the foods that you desire. Listen for the body signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry. Observe the signs that show that you’re comfortably full. Pause in the middle of eating and ask yourself how the food tastes, and what your current hunger level is (Resch & Tribole, 2021).
In our compulsion to comply with diet culture, we often overlook one of the most basic gifts of existence—the pleasure and satisfaction that can be found in the eating experience. When you eat what you really want, in an environment that is inviting, the pleasure you derive will be a powerful force in helping you feel satisfied and content. By providing this experience for yourself, you’ll find that it takes just the right amount of food for you to decide you’ve had ‘enough’ (Resch & Tribole, 2021).
Anxiety, loneliness, boredom and anger are emotions we all experience in life, sometimes all in one day! Each emotion has its own trigger, and each has its own appeasement. Throughout our lives, we all build individual coping toolkits, extremely personal ways we can comfort, nurture, distract or heal ourselves from complex experiences and emotions.
This principle is jam-packed with all sorts of treasure chests—we’ll learn to differentiate between emotional and backlash eating in response to deprivation; explore what’s in your own personal coping toolkit (and the role food plays within); we’ll work to dismantle the demonisation of emotional eating (thanks again, diet culture); and rekindle the intrinsic connection between comfort and food that is our natural right as human beings.
This principle is all about looking within, acknowledging what is true, and working on new ways to comfort, nurture, distract and resolve your issues (Resch & Tribole, 2021).
Accept your genetic blueprint. Just as a person with a size 8 shoe wouldn’t expect to squeeze into a size 6, it’s equally unrealistic to have a similar expectation about body size. It will be very hard to reject the diet mentality if you’re unrealistic and overly critical of your body size or shape. Your body deserves dignity and respect, no matter what; no matter your size or shape, and no matter what others may have told you. Developing body respect is a fundamental aspect and an essential part of the healing process (Resch & Tribole, 2021).
Forget militant exercise; just get active and feel the difference! Shift your focus away from the calorie-burning effect of exercising, and instead explore how it really feels to move your body. If you focus on how you feel from working out or exercising (yay for more energy, more alertness and a boost in serotonin) it can make the essential difference between rolling out of bed for a brisk morning walk, or hitting that snooze alarm for the third time (Resch & Tribole, 2021).
Making food choices that honour your health and taste buds make you feel good. Remember that you don’t have to eat perfectly to be healthy! You will not suddenly get a nutrient deficiency or become unhealthy from one snack, one meal, or one day of eating. It’s what you eat consistently that matters. Progress, not perfection, is what counts. Be gentle with yourself and your Intuitive Eating journey, you’re in it for the long run! (Resch & Tribole, 2021).
