If you have been following us for a while now, you know that the Food Ease Team is all about learning to eat intuitively and ditching diet culture. Months back we did a mini-series introducing the Intuitive Eating Principles week-by-week. There are 10 guiding principles of Intuitive Eating. The “easiest” principles come first followed by some of the most challenging ones that can take the longest to come such as body respect. 

If you find Intuitive Eating to be daunting or overwhelming, this post is for you. The goal of this blog post is to provide folks with small, specific steps to take when getting started with intuitive eating. As mentioned before, learning to eat intuitively is by no means easy. It is especially hard to learn to eat intuitively again when you have chronically dieted for the majority of your life. Giving yourself unconditional permission to eat and letting go of rigid food rules can be scary. When we let go of food rules it seems like we lose control however we actually gain more control. Intuitive Eating allows us to gain control over our own unique body and nourish it in a way that meets our needs instead of allowing diet culture to control how we eat.

So, I am sure by now you are wondering how to get started with Intuitive Eating, well first and foremost in order to begin eating intuitively again it is important to be open and honest with yourself about where your relationship with food lies. This can be challenging as there can be two voices in your head; one telling you that the way you are eating now is not making you happy and you wish to gain more freedom with food, and then there is that other side trying to convince you that you are happy with the way that you are eating currently. Ask yourself the following questions and answer them honestly:

1. Do I want to continue eating this way for years to come?
2. Am I truly happy with my eating habits now and do they serve my nutrient needs?
3. Am I missing out on making memories with friends/family because of my rigid rules around food?
4. Am I constantly trying the next best thing, but never seem to be happy with it for long?

It is important to be honest with ourselves and where our relationship with food stands initially. If you are having trouble figuring out where your relationship with food stands, we have a great resource for examining your food rules. Send us an email: hello@foodeaseco.com if you are interested in trying this free resource. After filling in this tool it may be beneficial to meet with one of the dietitians here at Food Ease Co to learn about how you can start to break some of those food rules.

Once you can establish where your relationship with food lies and recognize that you may be caught up in diet culture mentality, the next step is to reject it. Rejecting diet culture  and the diet mentality is a huge first step on your way to food freedom. As someone who has tried almost every diet under the sun, being told to just listen to your body and eat intuitively is not helpful. Finding your hunger and fullness cues again does not happen overnight. Somewhere along the years, we have lost touch with our internal cues as we have listened to diet culture’s standards of what eating enough looks like and not our own. 

The following are small steps you can take to reject the diet mentality:

• Clean up your Feed Online and IRL: this one is HUGE!
  • Unfollow those accounts that make you feel like your body is not good enough, those accounts that post TikToks with what I eat in a day and the first shot is of their abs (oddly specific but I have seen these types of videos way too much!! Basically, the purpose of the majority of these videos is to say: “eat like me and you will have abs” but do not take into account any other factors of that person’s life that could be the reason for the way their body looks like it does! Okay, rant over). Other examples of toxic social media are individuals that post things with #cheatday or celebrities who post brand deals with diet companies such as skinny teas or shakes. 
  • Cleaning up your feed in real life means setting boundaries for yourself. To that aunt who won’t stop talking about the next greatest diet even after you have politely asked her to stop talking about diet talk, just walk away. To the friend who is constantly critiquing everything you eat kindly reply with: “I would appreciate it if you do not food shame”, “those comments make me uncomfortable” or simply sometimes you just have to distance yourself from that person to focus on healing your relationship with food and body.
• Clean out the Dieting Tools: 
  • The calorie trackers got to go!! Calorie trackers are a huge reason for us becoming out of touch with our hunger and fullness cues. Letting a number dictate how much we should eat will not help us to eat intuitively. 
  • Ditch the scales! It is well known and researched that weight is NOT an indicator of health. So why do we let a number on the scale dictate how much we eat and the way we view ourselves? The number on a scale does not define our worth or health.
  • Fight the Fitness Trackers: watches and apps that track our steps/movement can actually be very harmful to our relationship with food and body. We may force ourselves to get that “perfect” 10000 steps a day even when we REALLY don’t want to. We may also feel like we don’t deserve to eat as much on days when our watch says we did not get that many steps in. Letting go of fitness trackers isn’t easy however in the long run can prove to be very beneficial for our wellbeing. 

So, there you have it. A few small but super impactful steps you can take when beginning your journey of intuitive eating. 

A reminder that if you are having trouble figuring out where your relationship with food stands, we have a great resource about examining your food rules. Send us an email: hello@foodeaseco.com if you are interested in trying this free resource. After filling in this tool it may be beneficial to meet with one of the dietitians here at Food Ease Co to learn about how you can start to break some of those food rules.