How to Integrate Intuitive Eating Principle 3: Make Peace with Food

The third principle of Intuitive Eating is: Make Peace with Food. This principle builds on the first two principles of intuitive eating, reject the diet mentality and honor your hunger. When you make peace with food you no longer categorize foods in a judgmental and stressful way. When you make peace with food, you allow yourself the opportunity to eat anything you want and to not have forbidden foods based on fear, shame or judgment.

When you make peace with food, you may also recognize that there are certain foods that don’t serve your body. This allows you to make an empowered choice to not eat those foods. However, this choice is based on your peaceful relationship with food, your body and your wellbeing—not fear and control.

When you feel as though you are at war with food and your body, eating itself becomes stressful and possibly shameful. When you carry guilt and shame related to food, you create a host of other problems internally and this struggle only increases potential emotional and stress eating patterns. These patterns lead to constant thoughts about food—which is definitely not a peaceful way to be with food.

When you restrict certain foods based on fear, judgment and shame, you will inevitably crave those food and possibly overeat or binge on them. When you tell yourself “I can’t have that food” it makes you want it even more. This is why restricting, dieting and extreme rules related to food creates cycles of “I’ll only eat it just this once,” cheat meals, or “this will be my last fun day with food” before that majorly restricting diet that you may put onto yourself out of punishment for these other seemingly out of control choices. When you make peace with food, food can be just food.

Thoughts about food, fear about calories, worrying about good food versus bad food and what’s the right or wrong thing to eat all create stress. When food is on your mind all of the time it creates fear about food and can lead to eating in secret and feelings of guilt and shame. These occurrences will only keeps you stuck in the dangerous cycle of emotional eating. Making peace with food is a process and practice that begins with mindful eating.

When you eat mindfully you are not judgmental of the foods you are choosing to eat. You look for the facts, what is true and release emotions surrounding food. That doesn’t mean you can’t look forward to eating a particular food, enjoy it and savor the process of eating. Quite the opposite really! When you are nonjudgmental you get to release any guilt, fear or shame around eating certain foods and be present with whatever you are choosing to eat.

As you begin to integrate this step into how you relate to food, eating and your body, you come closer to trusting yourself and the ability to know what your body wants and needs. Intuitive eating is about tuning into your body and its individual needs in relation to food, calories, combinations of nutrients and portion sizes.  Mindful eating is about tuning into your body and being present in a nonjudgmental manner so you can enjoy your food, savor the flavors and take in the pleasure you can derive from your food choices.

When you make peace with food you are intuitively aware of how different foods make your body feel, you honor your hunger and move away from restrictive thoughts. You are also able to tune into cravings and understand why the craving is presenting itself in this moment.

Cravings can be complicated. However, they can be addressed through the intuitive and mindful eating process and managed without stress, fear and shame. If you are experiencing a craving it can mean that your food choices are boring, repetitive and you feel unsatisfied. A craving could be a desire to release an uncomfortable emotion or to calm your stress. A craving could mean that you are out of balance nutritionally. A craving could mean that your body is out of balance. A craving could mean that you heard about a certain food and you just can’t get it out of your mind! 

When you are mindfully aware and intuitive connected to your body, you are able to make a non-emotionally driven decision about what to do with your craving. This process requires self-reflection, self-awareness and often some discipline to pause and give yourself space to consider what your craving is really all about.

The first question to ask yourself when you experience a craving is, “am I hungry?” If yes, “what am I hungry for?” If no, “what is the nature of this craving, what does it want me to know?” This is where you can get really curious! Check in with your stress level, mood state and give yourself space to release any emotions that need to be witnessed and understood. Did you get this food on your mind because it happens to be around, you heard about it, saw it, or smelled it?

When you experience a craving, you want to get deeply curious about the message of the craving rather than acting on it right away or resisting it with an effort to “be good.” The more you reflect and grow in self-awareness, the closer you find yourself to creating a more peaceful relationship with food.

As you create peace with food, you find that your thoughts are less driven by food, or if they are you understand why and have the tools to cope. As you create peace with food, you eat more mindfully and offer a nonjudgmental experience with the process of eating. As you make peace with food, you make peace with yourself, and this is the true gift of this process.

This principle of making peace with food can feel daunting as emotional and stress eating patterns are often deeply layered. Remember that this is a process and path to explore. There is no need to be perfect, just to be present, curious and attuned to your mind, body and your unique needs.

Finding where you can begin to make peace with food, one small step at a time, will create great amounts of freedom and space in your life for more pleasure with food. As you begin to consider how you can make peace with food, allow yourself to be nonjudgmental with yourself, the process, and notice how you begin to release old beliefs about food and open yourself to greater inner peace and mental wellbeing.

How to Integrate Intuitive Eating Principle 2: Honor Your Hunger

The second principle of intuitive eating is: Honor Your Hunger. If you began implementing the first principle introduced in the previous blog—reject the diet mentality—then you are ready to dive right into this concept. When you chronically diet and restrict foods or calories, you most likely expect to feel hungry at times—maybe even after eating. This just is not a sustainable way to be with food. 

When you restrict and ignore/suffer through your hunger, at some point your brain will override your attempts to not eat and you find yourself ravenously overeating. This is a biological drive to survive, we need to eat to sustain health, and when you don’t honor your hunger, you may find yourself creating dangerous patterns of overeating and possibly developing an urge to binge eat.

When you honor your hunger, you are engaging with mindful eating. Honoring your hunger requires that you are fully present while eating. Honoring your hunger requires that you pay attention to your body and its individual wants and needs. This is mindful eating as its core, being present with your food and listening to your body. When you honor your hunger, you are able to practice eating when you are hungry and tuning into to your body to determine what it truly wants and needs.  

One of the most valuable elements of mindful eating is the concept of nonjudgment. When you are eating mindfully, you continue to pay attention from moment to moment with this nonjudgmental awareness. When you don’t judge your hunger, your body or your food, you can be more fully present and in tune into your body in a deeper way. This allows you to determine—without judgment—what foods are satisfying, satiating and provide the energy, nourishment and pleasure that you deserve to receive from your food. When you practice nonjudgment of your food you allow yourself to let your food just be food.

If you have been engaging with the dieting yo-yo for a while, honoring your hunger may feel awkward, if not foreign to you at first. In my book, Wholistic Food Therapy: A Mindful Approach to Making Peace with Food, I offer the following hunger scale to help with practicing this principle. When you practice using this scale consistently to assess your hunger, you make the process of honoring your hunger feel much more doable. The more you practice tuning in, paying attention to your hunger cues and listening to your body during mindful eating, the more intuitive you become. Eventually you won’t need to consult the hunger scale, but in the beginning, it can be a very useful tool.

Hunger Scale:

0= no hunger present

1= slight hunger present

2= mild hunger, could eat a snack

3= fairly hungry, stomach may be growling, ready for a meal

4= very hungry, stomach growling, possible headache, may be getting irritable or shaky

5= beyond hungry, full on hangry

I recommend that you practice with the scale at least one time per day. When you have one meal or snack per day that you can dedicate to mindful eating you will grow in your comfort with honoring your hunger. Have a journal and writing utensil handy. Limit your distractions. Tune into your body and notice where you are on the hunger scale. Write it down along with the signs and signals your body is sending you in relation to how hungry you feel.

This feedback is so valuable and will allow you to see your own progress over time. It also allows you to identify and work through emotional and stress eating patterns. If you find that you are eating and you are not hungry, you can work through the Pause, Reflect, Release process to help change these patterns.

Practice eating slowly, mindfully, and engage all of your senses. After practicing this process daily for the week, you can review your notes and begin to see your patterns and any challenges with this principle of honoring your hunger. You will also begin to see where you are making improvements with trusting yourself, becoming more intuitive with your body, your food and more deeply in alignment with how you want to feel as you begin to make peace with food through intuitive and mindful eating practices.

How to Integrate Intuitive Eating Principle 1: Reject the Diet Mentality

The first principle of intuitive eating as created by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch is Reject the Diet Mentality. Did you know that the diet industry has about a 95% failure rate and yet it is one of the most profitable industries out there? That’s pretty frightening, and yet anytime someone feels frustrated by the previous diet that didn’t work, they can get sucked into the false hope of another one that may just be the golden ticket to lose weight (which most likely it won’t…). Even worse, chronic dieting can create a very unhealthy relationship with food and lead to disordered eating patterns.

The trouble with any diet is that when you begin, you know full well that there will be an end point. This end point might be a desired weight goal, size goal, event or season. What happens at that diets end point is the need to eat, to feel satisfied and to make up for lost time of deriving yourself from receiving pleasure from food. While it might begin with the intention of just this once I’ll eat this or that, or there’s a special occasion, and eventually the old patterns of eating find their way back into your life and the weight gain increases rapidly—way more rapidly than it took as you suffered to lose it. What may have taken months to achieve can be overridden in a couple of weeks.

It is clear that dieting and deprivation do not work for the long term. Diets feel restrictive, punitive and at times joyless and frustrating. In our current culture we have now shifted diets into new shiny wording of wellness and lifestyle to take the edge off. However, if a lifestyle or wellness plan requires complete restriction of certain foods it’s still a diet. If you are attempting to create an actual path to wellness with a desire to heal your relationship with food, any diet or lifestyle will most likely keep your feelings and thoughts about food and your body at the top of your mind. When this occurs it often creates stress and anxiety over food which only more negatively impacts the cycle of emotional and stress eating patterns.

Intuitive eating invites you to become the expert on what your body wants and needs—not a dietary theory. When you reject the diet mentality you can release the rules about food, the judgments you project on food and in turn inevitably internalize towards yourself. Then, you are able to step into being in tune with your food, your body and your internal experiences more fluidly and decisively.

Intuitive eating is a pathway to connecting with yourself and your body where you create a new and powerful way of being with your food that encourages health and wellbeing in mind and body. When you reject the diet mentality you might feel lost or worried that you might overdo it with food, and in the beginning you just might. However, the truth is that when you tune into your body you can recognize what foods satisfy your body, what foods make you feel good, vital and satiated.

When you integrate mindful eating into this first principle you can build a way of being with your food that is both informative and pleasurable. As you begin to let go of the diet mentality, commit to a daily practice of eating one meal or snack in a mindful way. When you eat mindfully, you notice the impact of what you are eating on your mind and your body.

Mindfulness is all about being fully engaged with the present moment without judgment. When you release judgments of your food (salad: good, pizza: bad) you are just eating what you are choosing to eat in this moment. When you tune in, eat slowly, pay attention to how your food makes you feel, you begin to create your own record of what foods make you feel good, of what foods allow your body to feel vital and the foods that you truly derive pleasure from and enjoy during and after eating them.

When you find that you are eating and you are not hungry, that is information that you are most likely in a pattern of emotional or stress eating. You can disrupt this with the pause, reflect, release practices to ensure that you give space for your emotions and stress in a way that does not involve food. That way when you are eating what you enjoy, you can focus on and be engaged with the process of eating, not the squashing of emotional discomfort.

Over the next week try these practices to begin rejecting the dieting mentality, integrate mindful eating practices and tune in to the wisdom and intuitive of your mind and body:

-       Keep a log of any dieting thoughts, fears, shoulds, hopes, shame…

-       Practice mindful eating each day with one meal or snack

-       Prior to eating allow yourself to tune inward and relax your body and mind and ensure that you have minimal distractions

-       Eat slowly, chew thoroughly and engage all of your senses

-       Practice nonjudgment of your food—stay away of thoughts of good/bad, superior/inferior

-       Make notes on how your food makes you feel and how satisfied and satiated you feel

-       Notice any tendency to restrict, count calories, any behaviors that feels like a diet

After practicing this process for the next week or so, go back and reflect on your log and journals and make any notes about insights you gain into what it means to let go of the diet mentality and step into mindful eating. Let me know how it goes!