Intuitive Eating?

Intuitive eating is something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about over the years. If you talk to naturally fit and thin people this is how they eat. They eat what they want, whether its salad or pizza or cookies and then just stop eating when they’ve had enough. There is no diet, no ideal carb balance, no forbidden food. These people’s bodies simply send a signal they’ve eaten enough and they stop. They don’t generally snack or emotionally eat.

Intuitive eating is also alluded to in books about overcoming emotional eating. Geenan Roth’s Breaking Free from Emotional Eating suggests using intuitive eating to eventually separate the emotional component of food from the physical. If you want a warm fresh baked cookie that reminds you of childhood, you can eat three plates of salad or pot roast or sushi, and eat until you hurt, but you’ll still want to eat more. It’s figuring out what food will satisfy your hunger that is important.

I’ve never been good at intuitive eating. Food and appetite has always been this big giant nebulous thing in the back of my mind that I both crave and fear. Food is comforting and delicious and relaxing. Being hungry is the awful feeling that I’m ashamed of. Thoughts like I’m over seventy pounds overweight, I don’t deserve to be hungry. The shame and the fear lead to my many issues  with food through the years, mostly revolving around a mild-moderate brush with bulimia.

Last night for example, I was making a veggie bake (a kitchen sink of sliced vegetables layered like lasagna and baked in marinara sauce and topped with low fat shredded cheese) and just had no desire to eat it. Even after it came out of the oven and smelled amazing, I choose to eat about four servings of dry roasted peanuts because I could. Even after I wasn’t hungry anymore I kept on eating them.

So right now I’ve already set my fitness goals, my weight loss goals and now, I”m setting my emotional health goal, I want, by next year to have dealt with my issues and be in a placed where food isn’t comfort but nutrition, and not be ashamed to want to eat.