What does it mean to be intuitive with food? Is it possible that becoming an intuitive person around food is actually how to become normal around food?
Intuitive eating can sound mysterious …
“Oh … well … my intuition just tells me to eat sweets. So do I just eat whatever I want …?? How does that work for weight loss??”
Is Intuition the key to Eat like a normal person?
I believe so.
Oftentimes we lose weight by using some sort of tool:
- a diet
- food journal
- calorie counter
- scale
But meanwhile around us we see healthy people that are exercising and are not dieting, food journaling or doing any other such thing.
How are these people doing it?!?
What does it mean to be intuitive?
From a 10,000 foot perspective…
Being intuitive with food means you are able to satisfactorily regulate your weigh, using just your body and mind.
Now to be fair, while you learn to become an intuitive eater, you may use tools like a food journal, meal prep, or mindfulness.
However, once you are truly an intuitive person with food and embrace the haes principles behind intuitive eating, you won’t need a food journal.
Have you ever food journaled and thought, am I going to be doing this the rest of my life?
What if normal people were intuitive with food?
Doesn’t it seem like normal people are intuitive with food?
- They can go to a party and not worry.
- If they over-eat, they brush it off.
- They can have a few sweets without binge eating.
Well guess what – normal people are intuitive with food.
And these days there is growing recognition on how you can develop skills to become a normal person with food.
Here’s what I’d have to say in terms being intuitive
I’d say intuitive eating is defined by eating from your right brain, or emotional brain.
What surprises people is how much they use their left brain, or logical brain to eat.
An example of using your logical brain to eat is when a nutritionist or personal trainer gives you a meal plan to follow.
Ah, wouldn’t it be nice if only having a meal plan to follow would enable weight loss?
But meal plans don’t work.
Why don’t meal plans work? Because they are strictly logical.
See. Our ancestors didn’t evolve with left brains. Left logical brains are fairly new to the evolutionary party. Here’s a good article by Healthline discussing this same point.
Our right brains are what we use to eat. Your hunger and digestion is regulated by your right brain.
So if we want to become an intuitive person around food …
We must learn to listen and trust the right part of our brain.
The basic premise is that our body knows how to regulate itself.
However, we get caught up in:
- thin ideal body image
- thinking we have to lose weight
- basing our self-esteem off our body image
These are LOGICAL traps that DISCONNECT us from our body.
For example, you might not be physically hungry. Yet then you see an image of a pulled-pork-BBQ sandwhich which makes you salivate.
Because you are unfamiliar with your body’s messages, you don’t know that salivation is a sign of Emotional Eating.
You get tricked, essentially. You simply don’t know your body well enough to distinguish false ‘hunger’ messages from real hunger in your belly.
So you ‘think’ you’re hungry. You’re drooling after all.
But you haven’t developed the skills and emotional awareness of your body to understand what your body is telling you.
Your body is telling you … I’m full. No need to eat. I’m full!
But … you haven’t practiced learning how to connect with your body.
So … you eat the sandwich …
And then this evil cycle happens:
So as you learn the answer to what does it mean to be intuitive …
You will start to shift out of thinking.
Especially after you binge eat.
After you binge eat is the best time to learn how to eat like a normal person!
Yet because you get trapped into LOGICAL THINKING
- Oh, I just screwed up again.
- And, I’m not skinny enough.
- Plus, I’m not good enough.
This thinking disconnects you from your body’s wisdom.
Your body will tell you – this doesn’t feel good – stop eating.
But you have to listen to it first.
Here’s another post on being an intuitive eater.
This post takes an entirely different approach to learning intuition. Specifically I examine the Law of Attraction.
