Why Eat Intuitively?
Freshly cracked coconut to make homemade coconut milk!
"Listening to your body will help you to heal faster from your chronic illness and lose excess weight long term!"
What is intuitive healthy eating?
Intuitive eating is the exact opposite of dieting! It is a way of life that trains you to listen to your body natural signals for when your are truly hungry and full, and promotes enjoying what you eat with out guilt or counting calories. Its freedom for the chronic dieters out there and helps to rebuild their unhealthy relationships with food. It reduces unnecessary stress in our lives , which helps to calm the nervous system, balance hormones, and increase our levels of serration making us much more happy. It promotes a healthy, balanced lifestyle of moderation and accepting our bodies natural body shapes by getting us to our body’s perfect weight set point. It prevents comparison of ourselves to others and much more containment.
The best caprese salad I ever ate, while enjoying an afternoon in Tuscany. What a pleasure!
What are the benefits of intuitive eating?
1. Eating intuitively in a natural way prevents us from getting overly stressed about what we are eating and calms the parasympathetic nervous system, which helps lower cortisol back to normal levels and helps to balance hormones, which in time prevents unnecessary, stress related belly fat.
2. When we eat all natural foods that have not been processed or refined, over time our stress levels drop, our hormones even out and our body’s will eventually reach their natural set points to keep us at a level that is heathy for us. We may not look like a Victoria’s Secret model 😆 But we will look the way we are suppose to. If we are healthy and happy isn’t that all that really matters in the end. Besides, even Victoria’s Secret models have some cellulite…
3. It aids in your recovery from a chronic illness, like chronic fatigue, by reducing unnecessary anxiety and rebalancing your nervous system.
4. It creates a healthy relationship with food and prevents “healthorexia.”
5. It creates more enjoyment in your life.
6. It helps you to have more enjoyable relationships and better social interactions.
7. It helps you to be healthier long term.
8. You will start to feel amazing, and more in control of your life and free at the same time.
9. It will help you to not be a “fitness drone” who only does what “they” tell you to do and start listening to your unique cues an signals of what is healthy and not healthy for your unique body type and metabolism.
10. It allows so much flexibility.
11. It helps you to focus more what really matters in life.
What are the challenges?
1. It can be difficult to break obsessive health habits: i.e. weighing yourself often, jumping from new diet fad to new diet fad thinking it the cure all even though deep inside you know its not, counting every calorie, calculating every step you have taken and the calories you have burned that day.
"You will start to feel amazing, more in control of your life, yet free at the same time!"
2. Overcoming “healthorexia” is hard! My “healthorexiea rant”: This is when someone won’t eat or obsesses about every detail regarding the health and nutrition of a particular food, only eating what is deemed “healthy”. This was me, especially in the last few years when doing research like crazy and trying to find out what I should and should not be eating to get better…I got to the point where I was so stressed out about what to eat that I would break down in tears over the choices before me and I would lose hours of sleep if I ate something that wasn’t what I was “supposed to eat”…It became ridiculous and now this is becoming the norm for so many people! In today’s society with social media, and Netflix documentaries coming out in swarms, we are more aware than ever about how our food supply has been genetically engineered, pumped full of toxins or produced from inhumane environments….that we are left with nothing “healthy” to eat. While most of this is probably true, (so sad 😣) the pressure to avoid these things has become overwhelming and all consuming to our lives! We are getting to the point where a health conscious person doesn’t even know what to eat anymore, and its almost as if our strict diets are becoming “a status symbol” instead of who we are as people on the inside. We are placing our value of a person based on how “clean” they eat! We cut out whole food groups because we lump them all together as the same and declare them “bad” or “inflammatory”, but we forget that all food groups (in their natural state) do have some nutritional value to our bodies. It is true that some choose to avoid certain foods for ethical or religious reasons, which is perfectly fine of course, but if we avoid these foods simply because we think not eating them will make us look better, or better than others who don’t eat them, then we are falling into this trap. When we eat moderately and a variety of foods then we not only feel better but we will enjoy our lives more and will be able to focus more on whats really most valuable, who we are on the inside (Ok, I am finally finished 😜 haha).
How to eat intuitively in a healthy way?
1. Through out your diet books, scales and food calculators today!
2. Don’t count your exercise calories burned and just use your heart rate monitors for exactly that, to check your heart rates during exercise to make sure you are in a safe range or to test for food intolerances.
3. Always eat whenever you are hungry and stop when you are satisfied, and try hard not to feel guilty about it.
4. Exercise and move around whenever you feel good and do rejuvenating, restorative exercise daily to calm the nervous system (i.e. stretching, walking, dancing etc…).
5. Try to eat your meals in a relaxed state, and not in a hurry or on the run like while in your car or standing up..sit and enjoy what your eating!
6. Try to avoid being around or joining in conversations with others about dieting.
7. Be in nature as much as possible and try to turn off your electronic devices as much as possible to help reset your nervous system.
8. If you are craving something, go ahead and eat it, but try to make it from scratch in its most natural state.
9. Avoid processed foods as much as possible but please don’t obsesses about it.
10. Stop following the “crowd” when it comes to diet and exercise, do you and be proud of that.
11. Make your food from scratch as much as possible but again don’t stress about it.
12.Make your food as yummy and tasty and as good as you can and enjoy every bite.
In Conclusion:
Eating intuitively is in my humble option the absolute best way of eating and will get you one step closer to feeling better and looking better long term, so why not give it a try today!
Written by:
Suzanne Wickremasinghe
Owner- Cocolime Fitness
Fitness for Fibromyalgia and Fatigue