Intuitive Eating Talk

This talk is an overview of the 10 principles of Intuitive Eating. It is in 2 parts, this is part 1. Learn the guiding principles for mindful eating and a healthy relationship with food, yourself, and your body!

Transcript

Welcome to a talk on intuitive eating by Sarah Nielsen.

These intuitive eating principles come from the work of Trebol and Raich.

And intuitive eating is a approach to eating that is helpful in combating overeating,

Emotional eating,

Binge eating,

Purging,

Restricting.

And I have worked in the field of eating disorders,

Disordered eating since graduate school.

I'm a licensed practicing counselor and have been since about 2006.

Again,

My name is Sarah Nielsen and welcome to this talk on intuitive eating.

The first principle of intuitive eating is reject the diet mentality.

You guys would not believe how far the diet mentality seeps into us in our lives.

So we want to be mindful of diet tools such as apps,

Such as the dreaded scale,

Fad diets,

Diet conversations.

We want to protect our food boundaries,

Not letting others comment on how much we're eating,

What we're eating,

Our body weight or size.

All of that falls under rejecting the diet mentality.

It's also the diet mentality is very ingrained in media,

Social media.

And so it's something to be very aware of.

It drives this train of unhelpful beliefs about how we should live our lives,

How we should eat,

How we should work out.

Diet culture is problematic.

It is a you're not kind of worth it unless you're thin and fit mentality.

It is highly targeting to women especially and it is a very,

Very big business,

Multi-billion dollar business.

And it sucks us in and it gives us false promises and it gives us restrictions in our life.

And the moment we have restrictions,

We have this paradoxical effect that comes in,

Okay?

And so what does that mean?

That means as soon as I tell you you can't have X,

You want X,

Right?

As soon as I tell you you can't have it,

You also start thinking about it.

And so it is this paradoxical effect that it works against actually what we're working towards,

Which is healthy lives,

Healthy body shapes and sizes.

And so principle number one,

We highly want to reject diet mentality.

Principle number two,

We want to honor our hunger,

Honor our hunger.

We want to keep our bodies biologically fed.

What does biologically fed mean?

That means listening to our body,

Our hunger levels,

Our full levels,

Our body sensations,

Mood,

Any of those things that indicate hunger and fullness.

We want to keep our bodies fed with adequate energy and carbs.

Otherwise,

We have the desire to overeat.

And see,

That's where that diet mentality comes in.

It keeps us in a restrictive mode,

Which actually leads to overeating.

That's why it's not helpful.

Excessive hunger dissolves all good intents and purposes for moderate and conscious eating.

So honoring our hunger,

We want to be cognizant of our hunger levels and our full levels,

Not letting our hunger levels get too high,

Not letting our full levels get too high.

We're trying to find comfortable levels,

Right?

And our hunger levels are impacted by being sick,

Tired,

Stressed,

In pain.

So our signals may be blunted.

So again,

This is a quick overview of the principles.

Make peace with food is number three.

Call a truce with the food fight.

Give yourself unconditional permission.

I know this sounds super scary.

We're used to rules and no's from diet mentality.

And so it could be scary to give ourselves unconditional permission.

Unconditional permission,

We are balancing that with gentle nutrition,

Which we'll get to at the end.

These principles build off of each other.

So when you tell yourself you can't have something,

The desires for it builds and builds and builds.

And then we eat it,

But we tend to overeat it.

Therefore,

If we just allow ourselves to have it in the first place,

The cravings won't come.

And if we do have it,

We can have a moderate amount within reason.

When we allow ourselves to overeat like that or binge eat,

Our feelings get very intense.

Guilt comes in and we know that cycle.

It just further promotes the overeating cycle.

When we don't have peace with food,

We engage in last supper eating.

That is also connected to diet mentality.

And that is that I'm going to eat whatever I can this weekend before I start my diet on Monday.

So we want to make peace with food.

Unconditional permission.

So that way,

An apple is the emotional equivalent of apple pie.

Full permission.

Nothing is off the table unless we have a medical condition that overrides it.

Okay?

Number four,

Challenge the food police.

The food police can come from others or ourself.

When it's within ourself,

It is that loud voice within us that is always saying no,

That is criticizing you for what you're eating,

How much you're eating,

Criticizing if you're not working out,

Telling you to punish by working out,

Telling you to punish by skipping the next meal because you ate too much this one.

All of that is the food police.

The food police voice is unreasonable.

It comes from diet culture.

It's deep within.

It's loud.

It's hopeless and it's filled with guilt.

It kind of reminds me of the voice of anxiety.

The anxiety voice is negative.

It's never encouraging,

Right?

It's kind of the same thing.

So we want to identify our distorted food thoughts and replace those thoughts.

Now that ties into a talk that I did on cognitive restructuring right on this app.

And so you're welcome to go check that out.

I highly encourage you.

So we want to listen for destructive food thoughts.

We want to develop foster,

Nourish,

Helpful voices,

Nurturing voices,

Voices that can objectively take in nutritional information without guilting,

Criticizing,

Shaming.

That intuitive eater voice.

We want to be mindful of our negative self-talk,

Of irrational beliefs,

And we want to replace irrational beliefs,

Distorted thinking with balanced thinking.

So you want to be aware of all-or-nothing thinking,

Absolute thinking,

Catastrophic thinking,

And linear thinking.

And we want to replace those with thoughts that are in the middle,

The gray,

The permissive thoughts,

The accurate,

The non-exaggeratory thoughts,

The cup-half-full thoughts,

Thoughts that are process thinking,

That allow for continual change,

Learning,

Growth,

Prioritizing.

Next up is discover satisfaction.

That will be principle number five.

Please go to part two.