Why Intuitive Eating Works

I have been thinking about you often and wondering how your journey with food and body is going?

I also have another podcast episode to share with you. This episode is with Tammy Lantz of the Love Food, Love Yourself podcast and is about Intuitive Eating and the spiritual path.

I have been deep into some new classes lately and as usual, I love to apply the material to food because how we do one thing is how we do everything.

One of my favorite teachings from the past few years is the necessity of having our gut, heart, and mind aligned when we take any action. 

The gut represents the body and means your body needs to be on board with your action. How do you think your body feels about the choices you are making? What happens if you get really still and ask it?

How attuned are you to your body on a daily basis? 

The heart represents your spirit, your soul, and your intuition. What would make your heart sing? What fills it with delight? Do you know?

We know we are satisfying the heart when we feel good about our choices and when we feel calm and at peace.

The mind is often what we allow to run the show, but it actually does not have all the answers. The mind has ideas and tries to keep us safe with those ideas, but the mind can be mistaken and the ideas are usually very limited. 

Take dieting for example. The mind might decide this is a great idea because the world tells us our bodies need to look a certain way and offers up diets as a great solution.

But if the heart and the gut are not on board, the journey will be harder than it needs to be. It will either feel like suffering during the experience or it will be short-lived.

This is why so many diets fail.  Somewhere in the system, something is out of alignment. It is very rare that a diet alone is going to bring the relief that people are looking for since we often don't even know what we are really looking for when we go on a diet.

We may be looking for love and acceptance.

We may be looking for freedom and joy.

We may be looking for connection and pleasure.

We may be wanting to feel good in our bodies. 

Those are the things the heart and the body want and the mind thinks a diet is a way to get there. But a diet may not feel good to the heart and the gut. It does not always bring joy and is often punitive and restrictive.

Diets are often embarked on from a space of fear and not love, which will never be aligned with the heart. Diets also are driven by black and white thinking and right and wrong thinking which will never feel free and expansive. 

Meanwhile, it has been shown time and again by organizations like HeartMath and those who study the power of meditation, that the most powerful force there is, is the alignment of head, heart, and gut.

This is why Intuitive Eating is so successful for making peace with food and feeling good in our bodies when we get the hang of it. Even the title "Intuitive Eating" is all about the heart and the gut. (Notice the mind is not represented in the title - because it's not the one that should be making the decisions.)

When we are actually practicing all 10 principles of Intuitive Eating, our guts are happy because the body is being properly nourished with a wide variety of delicious, nutrient-rich, and fun foods on a regular basis.  We are neither too hungry nor too full most of the time.

We are moving our bodies regularly, with joy and not punishment.  And we are respecting our individual differences in our bodies and our needs for rest, food, fun, and connection.  

Our hearts are happy because we are eating foods that are pleasurable and satisfy us. We are also facing our emotions and no longer running away from them. We bring more love and joy to the experience of being in a body. 

Our minds are happy because we are no longer putting ourselves in a box and feeling constrained and restricted by stories of what we should look like or how much we should weigh.

We are no longer judging ourselves every minute about our bodies or our food choices. We reject the diet mentality, make peace with food and defund the food police by no longer giving them our time and attention.

Ultimately, we get to craft the set of conditions for our unique body and lived experience that makes us feel good and that is what Intuitive Eating is all about. (We get to do that in all other aspects of our life as well.)

If your relationship with food is not where you would like it to be right now, are you in touch with what your body wants? Are you "in" your body or more in your head? Do you know what your heart wants? Do have ways of listening to your intuition and checking in regularly?

Being "in" our bodies, being in touch with our intuition (i.e. what makes us feel good), and being able to unhook from the minds unhelpful messages are essential practices embedded in Intuitive Eating that will lead to a lifelong peaceful relationship with food, (or anything else you are wanting to explore!)

Would you like to know more about Intuitive Eating or how to align your heart, gut, and mind? Feel free to sign up for a free call using this link.

I look forward to supporting you on your path to peace with food!