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!

Integrating Mindful and Intuitive Eating Practices

Mindful and intuitive eating are powerful practices to support the process of healing from emotional and stress eating patterns. When these elements are integrated and practiced consistently by easing them into your daily routine, they can make a major impact on your relationship with food. Mindful eating is all about being present with your food and eating in a state where you are calm, emotionally balanced, and your body is craving food and nourishment. Intuitive eating is about trusting yourself, and freeing yourself from food fears. Intuitive eating ultimately empowers you to be in charge of your food choices.

Mindful eating beautifully integrates into each of the principles of intuitive eating (as created by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch many years ago, I highly recommend their book—Intuitive Eating!). The principles are based on creating a healthy relationship with food, your body, and yourself. The intuitive eating principles allow you to step into the awareness that you are expert on what your body wants and needs. When you integrate the concepts of mindfulness along with these ten intuitive eating principles you have a very sound roadmap to make peace with food.

The ten principles of intuitive eating are:

1.    Reject the Diet Mentality

2.    Honor Your Hunger

3.    Make Peace with Food

4.    Challenge the Food Police

5.    Discover the Satisfaction Factor

6.    Feel Your Fullness

7.    Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness

8.    Respect Your Body

9.    Movement—Feel the Difference

10. Honor Your Health—Gentle Nutrition

You can click on any of the above principles to learn specifically about that one. Through each post I am detailing how to integrate each step into your life, one step at a time. Within each I try to weave in where mindfulness and mindful eating practices can enhance each of the practices and the process as a whole. I offer specific ways to consider each step and how to engage with each specific practice so you can begin immediately.

Each of the principles of intuitive eating are simple, and yet are not necessarily easy in practice. Diet culture is real and quite entrenched in our culture. It can be super difficult to pull away from the diet mentality—especially if you have been a victim of their promises and empty hopes for a long time. Diet culture has shifted subtly into the guise of health and wellness or branded as a lifestyle in recent years. However, if the way you eat does not make you healthy or feel well, if it requires restriction, and lacks any pleasure derived from food, is it really a sustainable way for you to eat? This is where I will begin in the next post with this very topic and principle one of intuitive eating!

Over these next several weeks we are moving into the holiday season, which during a “normal” year can cause stress, yet with the uncertainty of our current times, this season will most likely cause additional stress. Traditionally, those who struggle with emotional and stress eating feel increasing overwhelmed from Halloween until after the new year. The cold and dark of the winter, increased focus on treats and food, and increased pressure and stress all can amp up emotional and stress eating during this time.

If you begin integrating these intuitive and mindful eating practices you might find yourself in a very different place than you may have landed without them. Think of each of these steps as an opportunity to let go of old ideas, structures and fears when it comes to food, dieting, and body image and to begin to step into a space of empowerment and freedom when it comes to food, your body and most importantly, your life. Stay tuned for a deep dive into principle number one coming soon!

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.