Intentional eating is a proactive approach to eating that helps you make peace with food. With intentional eating, you combat the diet mentality, stop obsessing about food, and move away from mindless eating. It’s a combination of intuitive eating principles and mindfulness-based eating practices.
- What is intuitive eating? Intuitive eating helps you to exert positive control over your eating habits by eating in sync with your body’s built-in cues; choosing foods based on energy, nutrition, taste, and satisfaction; and giving up external rules about food.
- What is mindful eating? Mindful eating helps you to change negative self-judgments to compassionate self-talk so that you may empower yourself to pause before making choices about food.
When you are able to accept where you are now as a starting point, learn from your mistakes, and pay attention to what you are doing when you are doing it, you absolutely can learn how to eat healthy.
Eating is one of the most natural things we can do. Yet many of us apply unnatural rules to the way we eat. Our culture idealizes appearances, certain body shapes, dieting, and weight limits as part of a “healthy” life. The result is that most of us have unwittingly developed a dieting mindset. This means that we are constantly thinking about what we “should” be eating while also feeling deprived by what we’re not eating.
Nearly all studies have shown that diets don’t work in the long run, and they often backfire. Diets foster an unhealthy relationship with food that may cause you to become ill, suppress your metabolism, lead your body to store extra fat, develop obsessive thinking, or become more impulsive, isolated, rigid, or anxious.
“When we give up dieting, we take back something we were often too young to know we had given away: our own voice. Our ability to make decisions about what to eat and when. Our belief in ourselves. Our right to decide what goes into our mouths. Unlike the diets… your body is reliable. It doesn’t go away, get lost, stolen. If you will listen, it will speak.” —Geneen Roth
Are you ready to learn how to eat intuitively and mindfully? Intentional eating is a process, not a destination. You’ll begin by starting to train your brain and body to become more attuned. You’ll learn to embrace opportunities to pause and ask yourself, “What message is my body giving me and what does it need now?”
Intentional eating includes the following concepts:
- acknowledging that diets don’t work
- nourishing yourself in response to hunger cues
- sensing physical fullness as it occurs
- challenging “healthy eating” myths
- developing skills to cope with difficult emotions
- expanding awareness of nonphysical triggers to eat
- respecting your body’s needs to rest, sleep, and have downtime
- becoming more comfortable in your “genes”
- giving up comparing yourself to others
- bringing joy into exercise and moving your body
- stopping “should” and “shouldn’t” food thoughts
- treating yourself with kindness as you learn from mistakes
- pausing mindfully before eating
- experiencing the pleasure of eating
- noticing cravings and urges
- applying the real science of nutrition, gently
- taking into account how foods make you feel
Intentional eating is a skills-based practice that nourishes, heals, energizes, strengthens, and satisfies. Let’s work together to find out what happens when you’re attuned to your body and mind. We can begin a customizable no-diet plan that is based in self-care.
Let’s get started on making healthy eating natural again for you.
Get your free copy of A Guide to Intentional Eating when you sign up for my newsletter.
Based on my work helping thousands of people find ease with food and recover from eating disorders, this mini-workbook shares techniques that are proven to help you jump-start a healthy approach to eating. With intentional eating, you will learn to combat the diet mentality, stop obsessing about food, and move away from mindless eating. Get your copy today!
By submitting your name and email, you’re opting in for my biweekly email newsletter offering valuable psychology tips, personal wellness messages, health resources, inspirational quotes, and my most recent blog posts. You can unsubscribe at any time.
