How to Integrate Intuitive Eating Principle 6: Feel Your Fullness

The sixth principle of Intuitive Eating is: Feel Your Fullness. This principle is about more than stopping when you are full. This principle is about listening to your body, respecting your body and making choices based on how you feel versus the programmed stories from your past about food.

When you were growing up were you told to clean your plate? Were you told that there were children starving in another country that would be grateful to have the food you are refusing eat to or complaining about having to eat? While children might feign fullness so they don’t have to eat their vegetables, these stories you hear stick in your mind and can influence your choices and feelings about food as an adult.

How do you know when you are full? What signs does your body send you so you know you’d be best off to stop eating? In order to hear and respond to these messages from your body, you have to be paying attention. Mindful eating allows you to sense and tune into these signals from your body. It’s helpful to discern how full you feel when you are truly paying attention to the process of eating and the impact your food has on your body.

This principle requires that you listen to your body and respect how it feels and make choices accordingly. The principle is about feeling your fullness, meaning you need to be connected to your body, fully aware of your experience in the present moment. The following guide can be a helpful place to start. It is directly from the chart in my book: Wholistic Food Therapy: A Mindful Approach to Making Peace with Food.

Full Scale:

0= not at all full
1= not at all full, but aware of food in your stomach
2= slightly full, still could eat more
3= fairly full, may be helpful to wait 5-10 minutes and see if you are satiated
4= overly full, slightly uncomfortable or bloated
5= completely stuffed, very uncomfortable

Ideally you want to stop when you are a 3 on the full scale. If you find after a pause that you are not quite full, then eat more food. If you find that after a pause when you are at a 3 that you are full, stop eating. While this may seem simple, those food stories can take over and create all kinds of justifications to keep eating or to stop eating rather than listening to your body.

Some of the most common stories/internal excuses include:

• It’s so delicious, I don’t want to stop eating

• There’re only two bites left, what’s the difference?

• I don’t want to waste this food

• I should clean my plate

• This is a “cheat” meal/food so I need to eat it all since I can’t have it again for X amount of time

Here’s why each of these above justifications are ineffective and potentially harmful. For the first mental excuse, “it’s so delicious I don’t want to stop eating,” we’ve all been there. The question to ask yourself is, how am I going to feel if I finish this despite how delicious it is? If you are going to feel stuffed, uncomfortable, bloated, in pain or even sick, is it worth it? Only you can determine the answer.

For the second excuse, “there’s only two bites left, what’s the difference?” Here’s another way to consider this, if you eat it are you respecting how your body feels? What will be the impact of those two bites? Again, only you can answer this. If it feels potentially harmful to eat those bites, is it worth it to you?

The third excuse, “I don’t want to waste this food,” it can be helpful to really consider what wasting food means. Can you save the food for later? If you can’t, ask yourself what is the difference between stuffing it into your body when your body is already full or throwing it into the trashcan? There really is a difference here that can be difficult to discern and yet important. Throwing the food away is actually the more respectful choice for your body and ultimately the less “wasteful.”

The fourth excuse, “I should clean my plate” is a story you are telling yourself. Question this story, ask yourself, why should I clean my plate? What’s the purpose? If this is a story you have been telling yourself due to your childhood associations with meals, it can be a tough one to change. If this feels important to you, one way you can practice overcoming it is to always make a point to leave a bite or two on your plate and just see how it feels. If you truly are still hungry, eat it, if you are not, leave it. Give yourself space to practice a new story such as, “I do not need to clean my plate, I deserve to stop when I am full.”

The last reason is quite common. For those who are still struggling with the first principle of intuitive eating: rejecting the diet mentality, then this reason may feel really big. If you are restricting certain foods and only allowing them as “cheat” days or meals, then you will most likely overeat on those days/meals. If you are allowed to have that food again tomorrow—if you want it again tomorrow—would you feel such a compulsion to eat it all? Restricting leads to overeating and potentially binge eating. Pay attention to any restricting or judging of your food. The same applies to if you are restricting at a meal in order to over indulge in another meal. This pattern is dangerous and ineffective.

If feeling your fullness is an area that you struggle with, try starting with practicing this principle with one meal or snack per day. As always, try to limit distractions and eat mindfully. Pay attention to how your food tastes and the impact it has on your body. Listen to your hunger cues and your full cues. Practice pausing and tuning into your body. You might begin with setting an intention such as, “for this meal (or snack) I intend to listen to my body and stop when I feel full and satisfied.” Note what satiation and true comfortable fullness feels like for your body. Honor this feeling and allow yourself to continue to create closer alignment with your body’s wants and needs each and every time you practice.

How to Integrate Intuitive Eating Principle 5: Discover the Satisfaction Factor

The 5th principle of Intuitive Eating is: Discover the Satisfaction Factor. Often when you find yourself in a dieting pattern, you adopt the belief that eating healthy is bland and boring. Dieting often leaves you feeling deprived of pleasure from your food. When you are in a pattern of restriction you are depriving yourself not only from pleasure but from feeling satisfied and satiated. When you don’t feel these necessary elements from the food you eat, your body and your mind know that they have been duped! This is where thoughts about food and strong cravings can begin and become seriously problematic.

Food is intended to be pleasurable. We need to eat to survive and so foods that are delicious make us want to return to them to feel satisfied and satiated. When you deprive yourself of this basic need you will suffer.

To begin to integrate this principle and create a greater satisfaction factor with your food, first it is helpful to know more specifically what foods you truly enjoy. What flavors do you love? What spices and seasonings are enjoyable to your palette? What textures do you enjoy, what aromas? When you know what brings you a sense of feelings satisfied with food, you can create meals that are balanced, enjoyable, delicious and pleasurable.

Mindful eating is an extremely beneficial aspect of this awareness. When you are truly present with the food you are eating you will know if you feel satisfied or not. When you find yourself mindlessly eating and not receiving any satisfaction from your food choices it may be because you weren’t present while eating and forgot to taste and enjoy your food. If you are emotionally eating, even if the food tastes good, usually there is some negative self-talk and shame surrounding the process of eating and so you don’t truly derive the pleasure from eating that you deserve.

The concept of savoring is super helpful in this principle of discovering the satisfaction factor. If you allow yourself to smell, taste, chew slowly and thoroughly and pay attention while eating you will create the satisfaction factor quite naturally. If you are rushing, distracted or eating some “diet” friendly food just as a means to an end to be “good” you will most likely not feel satisfied. This only sets you up to crave, feel resentful and can possibly lead to overeating or binge eating at some point in the future.

To begin to integrate this step of discovering the satisfaction factor into your daily life, follow these steps:

·      Write down a list of all of the foods and flavors you know you love and enjoy eating

·      Write down some of the favorite meals you remember having throughout your life

·      Write down what tastes and qualities you often crave such as sweet, salty, crunchy, spicy, pungent, warm, cold, sour…

·      Break down foods you enjoy from each the primary nutrients including foods that provide fiber, vitamins, minerals, healthy fat, carbohydrates and protein

·      Review your list and write down if you remember the last time you ate each of these particular foods and if you have any stories or judgments about each of these foods

Get curious about any food stories that you’ve created in your mind about these foods that you enjoy. If you have been restricting any of them, can you allow yourself to eat one of those foods, when you are hungry and not emotionally charged? As you eat it, do so mindfully. Allow yourself to savor the aromas, tastes, textures and the process of eating. Pay attention and be present and notice any judgments that may arise and let any judgments go. Just eat, let your food be food and feel satisfying. Note how you feel after eating this food and any messages your body sends you in the way of your energy, physical responses and digestion. This is where you become the expert in knowing what your body wants and needs. This is where you are engaging in the process and integration of mindful and intuitive eating.

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.