Let’s talk a bit about Intuitive Eating. You may or may not of heard of this concept before – it’s based on a book by Evelyn Tribole & Elyse Resch that was written decades ago. It has had several editions published and I think, all in all, it’s a wonderful book for people who have disordered eating habits but who don’t have eating disorders. Don’t come at me – this is JUST my opinion. The book misses the mark on the entire concept of the psychological impact of eating disorders. First and foremost, eating disorders aren’t necessarily about FOOD, but about control over food due to the unknown. I would bet my last dollar that every single one of you have anxiety in your life. And your eating disorder is a manifestation of some of that anxiety. Because, let me tell you, once you go into recovery and you can no longer use the control of food to manage your anxiety, it comes RAGING out and will manifest into other areas of your life, regardless.
The book is a great start and I encourage you to read it. But if you try to JUST use the book to heal without additional help, be prepared for failure. This is because healing from anorexia requires A LOT OF FOOD at the beginning of your recovery and this book tells you NOTHING about the fact that you could be eating 5000 calories a day and still be hungry despite doing everything the book says. You can certainly practice intuitive eating AFTER you’ve been in recovery long enough, but to use this first; you are setting yourself up for disaster.
Here are the 10 principles if you are interested, it is taken directly from the Intuitive Eating website, https://www.intuitiveeating.org/10-principles-of-intuitive-eating/
1. Reject the Diet Mentality
Throw out the diet books and magazine articles that offer you the false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently. Get angry at diet culture that promotes weight loss and the lies that have led you to feel as if you were a failure every time a new diet stopped working and you gained back all of the weight. If you allow even one small hope to linger that a new and better diet or food plan might be lurking around the corner, it will prevent you from being free to rediscover Intuitive Eating.
2. Honor Your Hunger
Keep your body biologically fed with adequate energy and carbohydrates. Otherwise you can trigger a primal drive to overeat. Once you reach the moment of excessive hunger, all intentions of moderate, conscious eating are fleeting and irrelevant. Learning to honor this first biological signal sets the stage for rebuilding trust in yourself and in food.
3. Make Peace with Food
Call a truce; stop the food fight! Give yourself unconditional permission to eat. If you tell yourself that you can’t or shouldn’t have a particular food, it can lead to intense feelings of deprivation that build into uncontrollable cravings and, often, bingeing. When you finally “give in” to your forbidden foods, eating will be experienced with such intensity it usually results in Last Supper overeating and overwhelming guilt.
4. Challenge the Food Police
Scream a loud no to thoughts in your head that declare you’re “good” for eating minimal calories or “bad” because you ate a piece of chocolate cake. The food police monitor the unreasonable rules that diet culture has created. The police station is housed deep in your psyche, and its loudspeaker shouts negative barbs, hopeless phrases, and guilt-provoking indictments. Chasing the food police away is a critical step in returning to Intuitive Eating.
5. Discover the Satisfaction Factor
The Japanese have the wisdom to keep pleasure as one of their goals of healthy living. In our compulsion to comply with diet culture, we often overlook one of the most basic gifts of existence—the pleasure and satisfaction that can be found in the eating experience. When you eat what you really want, in an environment that is inviting, the pleasure you derive will be a powerful force in helping you feel satisfied and content. By providing this experience for yourself, you will find that it takes just the right amount of food for you to decide you’ve had “enough.”
6. Feel Your Fullness
In order to honor your fullness, you need to trust that you will give yourself the foods that you desire. Listen for the body signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry. Observe the signs that show that you’re comfortably full. Pause in the middle of eating and ask yourself how the food tastes, and what your current hunger level is.
7. Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness
First, recognize that food restriction, both physically and mentally, can, in and of itself, trigger loss of control, which can feel like emotional eating. Find kind ways to comfort, nurture, distract, and resolve your issues. Anxiety, loneliness, boredom, and anger are emotions we all experience throughout life. Each has its own trigger, and each has its own appeasement. Food won’t fix any of these feelings. It may comfort for the short term, distract from the pain, or even numb you. But food won’t solve the problem. If anything, eating for an emotional hunger may only make you feel worse in the long run. You’ll ultimately have to deal with the source of the emotion.
8. Respect Your Body
Accept your genetic blueprint. Just as a person with a shoe size of eight would not expect to realistically squeeze into a size six, it is equally futile (and uncomfortable) to have a similar expectation about body size. But mostly, respect your body so you can feel better about who you are. It’s hard to reject the diet mentality if you are unrealistic and overly critical of your body size or shape. All bodies deserve dignity.
9. Movement—Feel the Difference
Forget militant exercise. Just get active and feel the difference. Shift your focus to how it feels to move your body, rather than the calorie-burning effect of exercise. If you focus on how you feel from working out, such as energized, it can make the difference between rolling out of bed for a brisk morning walk or hitting the snooze alarm.
10. Honor Your Health—Gentle Nutrition
Make food choices that honor your health and taste buds while making you feel good. Remember that you don’t have to eat perfectly to be healthy. You will not suddenly get a nutrient deficiency or become unhealthy, from one snack, one meal, or one day of eating. It’s what you eat consistently over time that matters. Progress, not perfection, is what counts.
Remember though…. If you don’t understand how to do these things, you will relapse or fall into what you think is recovered, BUT YOU ARE NOT. Your eating disorder brain will trick you into thinking you are healed but you are not. Your mind does not want you to stop dieting. It is using it to calm its anxiety so it will do anything possible to show up differently, but in the end it’s still about control – over what you eat, how much, in what quantities and what foods you are still avoiding. This is why someone who can call your brain out when I tries to trick you is so important. It will take a LONG time before you can call yourself out.
This is the start button. If you want to talk to people who are recovering from ANY type of eating disorder, this, this right here…..”unconditional permission” to eat ANY food, at ANY time, in ANY quality… this is where most panic or give up even before they start recovery. You could also do what I did and physically give myself permission to eat all foods, but mentally, oh heck no; I was chatting up a storm in my head every time I took a bite of forbidden food.
So let’s found out how it went when I tried to “make peace with food” and gave myself “unconditional permission to eat”