How to Integrate Intuitive Eating Principle 4: Challenge the Food Police

I hope you are finding the deep dive into the principles of intuitive eating created by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch to be helpful, eye opening and thought provoking when it comes to your relationship with food. Today I’ll be exploring the fourth principle of intuitive eating: Challenge the Food Police. This principle is really all about embracing nonjudgment of your food choices and releasing fear, judgment and shame as it relates to food.

The food police are deeply entrenched in diet culture rules, regulations and beliefs about food. The food police tend to show up when you make a particular food choice and then will label that choice as good or bad—which we know only causes an internalization those feelings and creates a projection of how you will feel about yourself. This plays into feeling superior or inferior in relation to your choices rather than grounded and accepting, which is how you might prefer to feel.

The food police can be an external force as well. The people, books, studies and otherwise that will make comments about your choices, question your choices, praise you for making a “good” choice and maybe look at you a bit funny or even make a comment—with judgment—if you are making what they perceive as a “bad” choice. All of this only perpetuates stigma around food, body image and ultimately creates internalized feelings of guilt and shame.

Guilt shows up as your conscience. Guilt is an appropriate and helpful emotion to feel if you’ve actually done something wrong. Let’s say you are frustrated and take out that frustration on someone you care about and speak unkindly to them. You may experience feelings of guilt. That person did not deserve to be spoken to in that way, and most likely if you weren’t frustrated you would not have reacted in this way.

The guilt you experience is a helpful compass that signals to you that the way you acted was not in alignment with how you want to treat others or show up in the world. Now you have a choice to respond to that emotion. You can rectify your behavior through an apology. Following your apology you can show a concerted effort to change your behavior. The next time you feel frustrated, you can determine how to more appropriately and effectively cope with, manage and express that emotion.

I know this guilt talk has been a bit of a detour, however, it’s important to understand the nature and need of guilt. Guilt is helpful if you’ve actually done something wrong. If you eat a cookie, you are not doing anything bad or wrong and more importantly you are not a bad person for making that choice. The guilt that may show up from the food police in your head or around you however may make it difficult to wade through and clarify these feelings for yourself. Recognizing the amount of guilt you experience when it comes to your food choices allows you to explore your own food police more rationally and in depth.

What’s even worse is that the food police work through guilt and shame and when those feelings become internalized it can lead to emotional eating patterns. These patterns increase feelings of guilt and shame and lead to things like eating in secret, feeling ashamed and an increase in food cravings on an intense and deep level. Listening to and believing the food police ultimately can lead to dangerous emotional eating patterns and overeating because they are bound up in the diet mentality, judgment and the concept of restriction. When you allow food to be just food and ditch the judgment you feel more grounded and balanced in your choices.

Noticing the food police is enhanced when you pair it with the practice of mindful eating. Making a choice about what to eat and then doing so in a way that allows you taste, enjoy and be present with your food—without judgment. Be aware of thoughts about what you are eating and try to align with the facts about it rather than any emotions or judgments.

Some nonjudgmental self-statements might sound like the following, practice using them to combat the food police in your head and those potentially around you:

• This food tastes good to me.

• This food provides nourishment.

• This food satisfies me.

• This food satiates me.

• This food makes me feel _______________(healthy, energized, grounded…)

Some ways you can practice speaking to yourself in a kind, food police revoking manner might sound like some of the following:

• Today I choose to honor my hunger.

• The food I choose is my choice.

• I trust my choices.

• I know what my body wants and needs.

• I will eat this food with a mindful focus and notice the effects it has on my body.

• I deserve to enjoy my food.

• I deserve to nourish my body.

When you engage in this process of mindful and intuitive eating you begin to strip away judgment, fear and shame. Ironically, you may find that you crave less and restrict less at the same time.

For this week, practice noticing the food police while you are eating one mindful meal or snack. Be aware of any feelings of guilt and challenge them, ask yourself, “have I actually done anything wrong?” Take notes and see how you can transition to speaking to yourself internally in a nonjudgmental and compassionate way when it comes your food choices and your body. Begin using some of these self-statements and feel the internal shift that comes with this powerful practice.

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 Strengthen Your Mindset Muscle

If you have ever tried to build muscle at the gym, then you know that only lifting weights once in a while simply won’t cut it if you want to get stronger. It’s through consistency and repetition that you begin to build your muscles and feel stronger over time. The same is true for building your mental muscles related to your mindset and creating the opportunity to change your own patterns.

Think of building your mindset as if it’s strengthening your mental muscles. Each time you practice strengthening your mindset you become stronger. If you take a long break from this practice, most likely you will have to start small and rebuild one repetition at a time in order to regain your strength.

Mindset is what you focus on with determination coupled with consistently following through. Mindset is the muscle you strengthen that supports the process of change through taking consistent action. Each time you practice engaging your mindset, you become far more likely to follow through on the action steps needed to create the change you desire.

When you have a strong and focused mindset you are able to work through the mental noise and take control of the mental gymnastics that can derail you. We all have an inner self-saboteur. When your mindset muscle is strong, you’re ready to deal with that saboteur part of yourself. Through strengthening your mindset, you are prepared to remain strong in the face of the internal saboteur—usually experienced as convincing excuses— that usually arise from fear or shame.

Fear and shame are two emotions that can keep you living small, keep you feeling stuck and out of alignment with your vision for your life. The trick is that you must experience and understand these emotions, allowing you to feel and recognize the fear and/or shame and get curious about why it’s there. The shame plays off of the fear by way of reminding yourself how you maybe didn’t follow through in the past. The shame will then try to convince you that you won’t follow through based on these perceived failures from the past. This inevitably makes you feel so crummy about yourself so that you feel safer feeling the fear of change rather than taking the action YOU KNOW would move you closer to your vision. The mind is so tricky to conquer. The good news is that with consistency and practice you can have a greater understanding of your patterns and where the fear and shame are just an old narrative that you DO have the power to change.

Setting the foundation to build your mindset and strengthen your mindset muscle begins with knowing what you want and why you want it. When you can connect to your vision for your life and set goals, you have your future self to route for you and support you through the change process. The process from there really comes down to putting in the effort and using the energy of your hope for and belief in your future self to create a plan and then to take decisive action—consistently.

As always, it’s most effective for long-term sustainable change when you start small and develop your own inner trust muscle. You have to trust yourself; you have to believe in yourself. That is where you have to face—and at times wrestle with—the discomfort of any lingering experience of fear or shame. If you haven’t believed in or trusted your own abilities in the past, then it will try to come back and convince you that it won’t now either.

Setting up your plan based on your vision for your life and the goals that support your vision with action steps gives you a roadmap to follow. You want your goals and action steps to be simple, specific, doable and desirable. You build on these steps over time as you begin to trust yourself and believe that you not only can, but that you WILL follow through. For example, if you want to move more, you might begin with putting on the clothes you want to move in and wearing them for the time you want to move. The next time, wear the clothes and move for 5-10 minutes. Plan each detail such as the days you will do this and specifics of what you will do for the week. Review at the end of the week and check in with what happened when you did follow through and what happened when you didn’t. Understanding your own pitfalls, blocks and inner saboteur as well as what motivates you gives you valuable information about how to move forward. Self-reflection and self-awareness will guide your process. You can apply this process to anything you’d like to integrate, change or do.

When you do this consistently, week to week, you will be strengthening your mindset muscle, which will draw you closer to your vision for your life. If you are someone who prefers step-by-step specifics, try the going through these steps below to begin strengthening your mindset today.

1.    What do you want?

2.    Why do you want this?

3.    What will allow you to get what you want?

4.    When will you do the action that allows you get what you want?

5.    What fear or shame comes up for you around taking this action?

6.    Where can you start small and put these actions into place?

7.    Now create your plan.

8.    Now reflect on how it goes and learn from your struggles and from what motivates you.

9.    Practice, be consistent!

10. Re-evaluate.

If you go through these steps to strengthen your mindset muscle so you can align yourself with your vision for your best life, I would love to hear how it goes. If you’d like a refresher on the 10 steps to create a life you love, you can revisit the full overview HERE or go to the blog and read about each step in depth. Change is challenging and yet necessary for growth. The stronger your mindset is through the change process, the more alignment you will experience with your vision for a life you love. Practice strengthening your mindset muscle and you will feel the impact within your life in so many positive ways.