The science of nutrition can often seem like it’s all over the place. One expert might tell you that meat is toxic and should be eliminated from your diet and another doctor might tell you that no you need meat for protein and vitamin B12, while a nutrition expert tells you that you can have white meat but too much processed red meat increases your risk of developing cancer. Then people following ketogenic and carnivore diets are saying that diets high in animal products will cure every issue you’ve ever had. Basically nutrition can often feel like a shitshow. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of people who are experts in nutrition and who are absolutely worth listening to but I recognise that it can be very hard to pick out who the experts are. One thing that I find helpful in breaking through this nutritional fog is following a mainly intuitive diet. Intuitive eating and having an intuitive diet basically involves both taking your food preferences into account and listening to your body and how it responds to what you eat. When we adopt a diet like this, it is easier to figure out what works for you and what doesn’t. Personally, I find that I will feel a lot better after eating a plate that is a mix of veggies, starchy foods and a small bit of meat than I would after eating a big mac. I’d feel fuller for longer, feel less sluggish and my stomach would be a lot happier, so based on knowing that a balanced meal would make me feel better, I would choose that if I was eating intuitively. In this post I will go over what I understand intuitive eating to be and how it helps me block out all the contradicting noise that comes from the nutrition community online, because afterall anyone can claim to be an expert online.
What is Intuitive Eating?
A common misconception when it comes to intuitive eating is that you just eat whatever you’re craving whenever but this isn’t really true. Intuitive eating is about relearning your body’s hunger cues and being able to distinguish between physical hunger that builds up over time or emotional hunger that occurs when we’re using food as a coping mechanism to deal with difficult emotions. It involves not putting eating off in an attempt to eat less or avoiding certain foods, but honoring our physical hunger by eating when we feel hungry and allowing ourselves to have the foods that we enjoy, while also taking into account how these foods will make the body feel. Intuitive eating is all about listening to and trusting our body. It’s about sitting with your food and really enjoying it, while also knowing your body’s fullness cues and honoring your body by not eating beyond that. When we have an unhealthy relationship with food, it can be really difficult to do these things but working towards these concepts is a brilliant place to start healing your relationship with food and diet. If emotional eating is something you struggle with, intuitive eating teaches us to look for other ways to cope with emotions, as this would honor ourselves more. This means replacing our food crutch with a soothing exercise like yoga, going for a walk, reading a book, doing a hobby you enjoy or chatting to a loved one, anything that makes you feel good. I do recognise that this can be really difficult if you struggle with mental health issues and often we need to work on confronting and changing the beliefs that fuel our specific mental health issues before we can really put our energy into adopting a more intuitive approach to eating. If you do have mental health issues holding you back from adopting healthy eating habits, I would recommend consulting with a professional in that area. In summary, it can be so helpful to listen to our bodies when it comes to learning what food makes us feel good and what food makes us feel bad and nine times out of ten those foods that make our bodies feel good are the ones that are good for us.
What if healthy foods are making me feel unwell?
Unfortunately, nutrition is not quite as simple as just eating intuitively for everyone, even if it is very helpful for most. One example is if people are used to consuming a diet quite low in fibre and then suddenly increase the amount of fibre they consume by a lot, this can cause them some gut issues like bloating, gas and pain. This is known as the fibre paradox, a phrase coined by Dr. Will Bulsiewicz, who is a gastroenterologist and is passionate about healing our gut through diet. The fibre paradox is basically when the gut microbiome lacks the microbes necessary to break down the fibre we consume, which causes gastrointestinal distress so we find it difficult to consume a lot of fibre, but the consumption of a lot of fibre is necessary to heal the gut so we should increase our fibre intake. So, although we feel bad it is still healthy to consume more fibre. Therefore, in this example it is better not to listen to your body and is better to listen to the doctor! Another example is if people have intolerance’s to certain foods. For example, if people with Irritable Bowel Syndrome or IBS listen to their body, they will end up cutting out a lot of food. It is recommended that for people with bad IBS that they do actually cut out these foods and follow a low FODMAP diet for a period of time, but they will eventually add foods back in in increasing sizes, which will likely cause pain and gas and bloating, but this is healthy as it is hoped that this will increase the sufferer’s tolerance towards certain foods. A final example comes from myself. Raw red onions make me soooo gassy and disgusting feeling if i eat too many but they are healthy and I do like the taste of them! If I eat them now I usually just eat a few mixed in with other foods but I actively avoid cheese and onion Taytos for this reason even though I like them and think they taste good.
Applying Gentle Nutrition
As well as listening to our body, it is important to apply what is known as gentle nutrition when practicing intuitive eating. So, on top of honouring our tastebuds with tasty food, we want to honour our body with healthy food. Basically the aim is to provide ourselves with healthy, tasty food. Gentle nutrition means not being a rigid perfectionist when it comes to diet and not adhering to food restrictions or following rules with what you eat. When we approach food with this rigid attitude, we end up beating ourselves up when we inevitably fail to follow our rules at all times, which is not what we want. Food should be a positive thing that adds to our life enjoyment by being tasty and providing good health, not a stressful thing that is unenjoyable. So firstly when implementing gentle nutrition, we want to pay attention to how food makes our body feel, which is what I addressed above. This just involves paying attention and having this guide your food choices. This doesn’t mean choosing the meal that makes us feel good every time, because we also enjoy a Big Mac sometimes and we want to reduce our rigid attitude, but in taking into account how certain foods make us feel we are more likely to choose the food that feels good.
Which brings me into my second point, which is that we want to be mindful when eating. We want to really appreciate what we eat and give our food the attention it deserves. This helps us enjoy our food more, notice how it makes us feel and also helps us to notice when we are feeling full so that we know when to stop eating. I’m definitely guilty of not doing this enough like I literally just ate an Aero Bar while writing this, but it’s about making an effort even for one meal a day just to get to know our body and how the food makes us feel.
Another point which is important when practicing gentle nutrition is to try and add variety to your diet and remember that we want to add foods, not take them away or be restrictive. We know certain foods like oily fish, nuts, seeds and veggies are healthy so we want to add these into our diets because we know they will make us feel good and we can make them tasty. Let me give you a scenario: If we adhere to a dieting mentality, we might have a low fat natural yogurt for breakfast with some strawberries. If we follow the gentle nutrition mindset, we want to add food not take away so we will have yogurt (full fat or low fat, whichever tastes better to you and whatever makes you feel good), we will have the strawberries, we might add a little bit of honey for flavour, a handful of mixed nuts for healthy fats and protein and we might have a slice of sour dough toast on the side with butter because we want to add some more fibre in there too which will help our gut bugs. Which meal sounds more satisfying to you? Which one would keep you fuller for longer? Which one would make you hungry in an hour and more likely to consume more energy dense snacks throughout the day? Which one sounds tastier? I’d hands down go for the gentle nutrition option because I’d enjoy the taste of it and feel good after it and on top of that, I would get a lot more good nutrition.
Intuitive eating and gentle nutrition is a topic that I’m really interested in as it seems to really take into account peoples needs in regards to their emotional state and their physical state while also placing an emphasis on a person’s personal tastes and preferences, which I think would be really healing for a lot of people. I personally love a holistic approach to nutrition and I feel like intuitive eating really encapsulates that. If you’d like some more information, I’d recommend looking up Colleen Christensen on Youtube. She’s a registered dietitian who has sooo much content on intuitive eating and examples of how she applies it to her life which is really helpful. I also like how Rachael Hartley talks about intuitive eating on Instagram, if you look up her name she should show up there.
NutritionWithMaidi 