Intuitive Eating and Spiking Part 3

Listen to your body and don't deprive yourself

I just read this awesome article on the Principles of Intuitive Eating that I want to share and discuss. 
  

 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating

https://www.intuitiveeating.com/content/10-principles-intuitive-eating

I don't feel right posting the whole article but I encourage you to click the link and check out all 10 principles. 



First I have to say that I highly disagree with Principle number eight. 

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 as futile (and uncomfortable) to have the same expectation with 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 about your body shape.

I'm not saying don't respect your body but I am saying you don't have to accept your "genetic blueprint" and based on my transformation I really doubt there is such a thing. I truly believe anything is possible if the desire is there. How lean you want to go is a personal choice and simply being happy and content with your body and life is the ultimate goal.  I wasn't happy being overweight and I used to dream of looking the way I do today. 


However I love Principles 1-4 because it's about our relationship with food and control. Those are two of the most important factors that determine long-term weight loss success.

1. Reject the Diet Mentality Throw out the diet books and magazine articles that offer you false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently. Get angry at 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 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 re-building trust with yourself and 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 food, 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 dieting has created . The police station is housed deep in your psyche, and its loud speaker shouts negative barbs, hopeless phrases, and guilt-provoking indictments. Chasing the Food Police away is a critical step in returning to Intuitive Eating. 

 A transformation on the inside will lead to a transformation on the outside.