After trying one diet after another and ending up weighing more than when you started, you hit rock bottom and realize that dieting doesn’t work. Diets only make you obsess about food, calories and fat. Depriving yourself increases cravings and is often the cause of crashed diets.
Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch offers chronic dieters a way to stop obsessing about food and enables them to lose weight without counting calories or avoiding food groups.
The first step to recovering fromyo-yo dieting is to find out what type of eater you are. Intuitive Eating provides information on a variety of eating styles:
- The Careful Eater- aims for perfection.
- The Professional Dieter- always on a diet. Tries all the latest diets, read all the latest diet research and tries every weight loss program.
- The Unconscious Eater- eats while doing other tasks. This type of eater isn’t aware of how much they really eat in terms of calories or servings; they just mindlessly eat until the food is gone.
- The Waste-Not Unconscious Eater- the penny-pinchers and the members of the clean plate club.
- The Emotional Eater- Easting as a sign of deeper issues that need to be dealt with.
- The Intuitive Eater- follows their hunger signals and eats without guilt or shame. Intuitive eating is the only style that lets you eat what you want without restricting your diet. It is also the only eating style that works long term to lose weight and keep the weight off.
Once you learn what type of eater you are, you’ll be able to address you issues with food and work on reading your body’s hunger cues.
How to Become an Intuitive Eater
- Stop dieting
- Don’t count calories or fat grams
- Avoid trigger foods that lead to binge eating
- Pay close attention to your hunger and fullness
- Eat in moderation to avoid binging, cravings and feelings of deprivation
- Turn off your inner voice that guides you on what you “should” eat
- Stop labeling foods as either good or bad foods
- Learn when you are really satisfied to stop eating sooner
- Face emotional issues head-on instead of medicating yourself with food
- Learn to love your body and become the best “you” you can be
- Practice positive self-talk
Difficulty with Intuitive Eating
The common problem for dieters learning to be intuitive eaters is they have no clue how to handle their emotions without turning to food. It is a habit that is difficult to break and it is important to find other ways to cope with stress.
Overeating is often caused by anxiety and uncomfortable feelings. We try to push these feelings down with food so we don’t have to explore the feeling or address the real issue at hand.
“If you find that you’re doing quite a bit of eating when you’re not biologically hungry, then there’s a good chance that you are using food to cope.”(Intuitive Eating)
With intuitive eating, there are no rules and no good or bad foods. By making peace with food you will be able to let go of your fears and eat again without feeling guilty. Intuitive Eating will help you stop dieting and start living.
