Why Eating Intuitively Is The Secret Sauce To Resolving Your Anxiety Around Food

There is so much information out there these days about what to eat and when. Countless diets, celebrity endorsed fads and nutritional approaches, you can easily get lost down a rabbit hole of #foodporn, so how do you know what the heck to eat, especially if you’re aiming for a particular goal?

Enter, intuitive eating.

Intuitive Eating is based on these 10 principles, as a guiding philosophy of not what you eat, but how you approach eating.  

It's based in evidence-based practices that gives you the behaviour change, self-awareness and intuitive practices instead of restrictive dieting or suppressing hunger, which, if you’re aiming for a positive relationship with your body, is NEVER a good idea for long term success.

Intuitive eating is all about feeling calm, clear and in control and eating the foods your body needs. It’s a mindful, connected way to living your life and a core philosophy in my coaching process.

And guess what, it’s the intuitive habits around your health and nutrition that keep you consistent, and successful.

Because here’s the thing: you can’t out-smart your intuition. Your intuition is not thought-based, it’s in fact subconscious feelings-based.

That’s why when you uncover your subconscious thought process, intuitive eating can be the secret sauce to consistency and control in your eating habits.

I know this firsthand, from my own relationship with food and how through a process of trial and error and experimentation I was able to manage that old crippling anxiety creeping back into my life.

I found eating intuitively created the same empowering approach I use these days in my coaching, which addressed my relationship with food, stress and my body, so I could find it easier to stay on track, be less anxious when it came to food and eat in a way that served me.

And here’s the thing: 95% of your thoughts are subconscious, so this means what's going on BEHIND the scenes when you make food choices. That includes your underlying beliefs in how you interpret cravings, emotions, hunger signals, energy dips, existing beliefs around what certain foods mean, cultural programming and how your body physically feels.

Uncovering YOUR beliefs is often the missing link to being able to stop eating emotionally, picking at food, having the #guilts, self-sabotaging yourself and making up more stories about the foods you’re eating, and whether you’re constantly feeling shackled to counting calories, feeling deprived and missing out or not.

Knowing you have a unique biochemistry and navigating obstacles around nutrition through this intuitive eating philosophy is part of the work I do, by helping you craft a tailored approach using the philosophy of food as medicine, so like me, you can let go of any limiting beliefs holding you back and re-write your relationship with food.

What other benefits can you get from this eating philosophy?

Intuitive Eating Benefits

There are evidence based benefits that range from mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual, in practicing intuitive eating principles that can make a significant impact on your life.

That can include boosting your relationship with your body, your confidence and self-esteem, body love, and overall satisfaction and quality of life to reducing anxiety and depression.

That’s what I saw happen with Suzie, who came to me not being able to stop picking at her food, sabotaging herself as soon as she lost weight, and constantly feeling anxious about what to eat and guilty when she fell off the wagon.

We addressed Suzie’s emotional eating triggers  and her relationship with her body by identifying her underling beliefs. We then looked at the bigger picture for her, in her stress triggers that were keeping her anxious, unable to lose weight, her sleep hygiene and energy levels. As soon as Suzie knew what to eat and when to get rid of inflammation in her body and heal her gut, she was able to balance her hormones and found her entire relationship to food change, especially how she managed her emotions, cravings and hunger.

This gave Suzie the consistency she had struggled with for years!! She also improved her risk of diabetes by becoming more insulin sensitive, her bad cholesterol and her high cortisol levels making it much easier for her to see the weight loss she wanted in the first place!

Reflecting on Suzie’s story, I’ve put together my top 7 Tips on Intuitive Eating and how YOU can get started right away:

How To Start Intuitive Eating

Here are my top 7 tips on your next steps:

1. Set Your Environment Up for Success

Physical: Being surrounded by heavily processed foods, sweets and artificial crap in the house will make it extremely challenging when you’re first starting out.

Even though intuitive eating is not counting calories or thinking about foods as good vs bad, if you know that your underlying habits are to reach for this sort of stuff when you’re stressed or emotional, use your wisest intuition to cull it from your immediate environment. However, that’s not to say you can’t indulge in some good quality desserts or foods you intuitively know make you feel good!

Mental: You’re bombarded with more than 50,000 advertisements a day, from blogs, to brands, companies or people on social media. If you decide that certain messages don’t contribute to a more positive mindset, or they don’t serve a purpose like educate you on new perspectives they are creating a toxic environment for your emotional and mental wellbeing.

2. Empower Yourself

As you start to experiment with intuitive eating, it’s important to also explore your underlying thoughts and automatic behaviours. Are you aware when you’re genuinely hungry? Does a big stressful day at the office interfere with your food or drink choices?

If stress is a major aspect of your day-to-day, trying to focus on stress resolution by identifying your underlying triggers to stress, and the self-care practices that resonate with you. This process allows you to empower your thoughts, habits and practices that may be keeping you stuck from where you want to be. For readers of my blog, I am offering a free 30 minute Empowerment Session to get you started.

3. Work with an Accredited Professional

Work with an Accredited Nutrition Coach and a health care provider you trust and can support you on your unique health journey.

4. Educate Yourself with The Facts

Eating intuitively means being self aware with how certain foods make you feel, both physically and mentally. And a way to do that is to educate yourself on how you can heal your body, specially or you. 

5. Eat healthily as a lifestyle

It’s so easy to get caught up in a goal to eat restively to lose a certain amount of weight. Or to restrict yourself, feel deprived until you reach your goal and then….you lose control, self-sabotage, gorge and put the weight back on and feel guilty, losing confidence in your ability to do this long term.

That’s why shifting your approach and mindset to that of eating in a way that nourishes and supports your body as a lifestyle habit, rather than a goal, is crucial in your long term success. Intuitive eating allows you to really deeply understand why you’re eating certain foods, feeling connected to your hunger cues, cravings and emotions.

This tip is a crucial mindset shift to step out of the diet mentality and into a space of respect, happiness and long term success, in combination with Tip No 2…..

6. Dont Eat Your Feelings

You’ve had a rough day at the office, so you go home and eat the tub of ice cream or drink the bottle of wine, because you know…. #thestruggleisreal, right? I see this daily, where the women I work with use food as a distraction, or their comfort blanket, as a crutch to resolving issues, stress or feeling wiped out.

How liberating would it then feel to be have completely resolved this, and be able to separate your underlying thoughts so that when emotions come up, (which by the way they inevitably will), but that you don’t reach for the chocolate and cocktails…and have total control over over what you decide to do next? Yep, that’s where inner calmness and clarity come in and where those exhausting mental games don’t dictate the rhythm of your day. This is the first step and my top tip to stopping the self sabotage, emotional eating and using food as a coping mechanism.

With intuitive eating, you’re learning to identify your feelings without using food, and be completely in control of the script of how you approach each and every day.

There are many ways you can start to identify the underlying thoughts and feelings you have without using food, from allowing yourselves to feel that emotion, journaling, or working with a wellness coach, so you can building your self-awareness and inner work along with the habits you need to support your goals.

7. Respect Your Body

A lot of you know, my mission is to support women heal their bodies. And that means having the right mindset towards how you feel and think about it.

Here's the difficulty: We are constantly bombarded with images of what our bodies should look like. If you’ve ever been on IG, you’ll know that you can get lost down a spiral of comparison and self loathing in seconds. It’s hard to separate the reality from the airbrushed version of other people’s lives, and hard to stop comparing our bodies to the celebrities or models who make a living getting their photos airbrushed and published to sell us stuff.

That’s why intuitive eating works in well with respecting your body, because you're aiming to eat foods that nourish it, rather than deprive it.

That’s where having a gratitude practice can work well in respecting your body size, shape, and what it does for you. Think of all the ways your body allows you to do things like walk, play, dance and exist. When you start comparing your body to someone else, stop and draw your thoughts back to what you’re grateful to have done literally in your shoes. What experiences, physical feats or day to day activities are you grateful to have had in your body?

If you want to be proactive about your health, by creating a self-health road map in one of my free 30 minute Consultation click here, or join me in my Fatigue to Flourish Facebook group to access a community of like-minded gals and the latest evidence based nutrition, stress and energy practices.