How Mental Restriction Interferes with Practicing Intuitive Eating

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How Mental Restriction Interferes with Practicing Intuitive Eating

Whether you are new to intuitive eating or have been practicing it for some time, the notion of giving yourself permission to eat foods that are generally thought of as “unhealthy” is likely something you’ve heard before. This concept is part of the third principle of intuitive eating, Make Peace with Food, and allows for freedom to explore and choose foods based on whether you actually like them, versus whether or not diet culture has deemed them to be “good.” 

But what if you’ve stopped dieting and your brain hasn’t?

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What You Need to Know About Gentle Nutrition

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What You Need to Know About Gentle Nutrition

Gentle nutrition begins to consider how we can incorporate information about nutrients and the health-promoting properties of specific food-types in a way that is not morally laden or rule bound. But we need to be actively challenging both the moral judgments we’ve attached to food and the food rules we’ve internalized before we are going to be able to integrate nutrition information in a way that is truly neutral. Which means, we’ve really got to work through the earlier Intuitive Eating principles before this one is going to be accessible.

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Why Your Motivation for New Diets Doesn’t Last

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Why Your Motivation for New Diets Doesn’t Last

Imagine this scenario: You just stepped on the scale and were disappointed by what you saw. You decide that, “OK, that’s it, today’s the day I am going to change.” You decide which plan or program you are going to follow. Maybe you re-install one of those food tracking apps. You schedule new workouts into your calendar. And you are ALL IN…for a while. But after a period of time—a day, a week, a few months—that motivation begins to fade. You are sick of the eating plan. You dread your workouts. And eventually, all of those new behaviors you were once so excited about slip away.

Sound familiar? I can tell you this is an incredibly common story, so if you are nodding your head yes I promise you are not the only one.

So why does this happen?! (Keep reading, I’m going to tell you!)

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Help! I Started Intuitive Eating and Now I Can’t Stop Eating

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Help! I Started Intuitive Eating and Now I Can’t Stop Eating

A common experience that our clients and group participants will note, especially early on in their journey, is their frustration around feeling like they want to eat everything and often eating past the point of physical comfort. The thought is, “I’m doing exactly what I was afraid I’d do,” and the desire is to return to the rules to regain some sense of control. So first, I just want to stress how normal this during this process. Below I describe several reasons why this might be happening and offer some ideas for what you might do if this is where you are finding yourself.

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Can Healthy Eating and Intuitive Eating Co-Exist?

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Can Healthy Eating and Intuitive Eating Co-Exist?

One of the fears many clients report when we talk about letting go of food rules is, “If I let go of the rules, I’ll only eat the unhealthy foods.” There’s a lot to unpack in this sentence, including the black and white belief that foods are either healthy or unhealthy, but also why this fear exists in the first place and what they fear would happen if this were true. This post, however, will focus what I think the main question is, which is: “can I eat intuitively and also desire to eat nutrient dense foods?”

The ways in which intuitive eating is depicted in the popular media and by many social media influencers often doesn’t help matters much when it comes to contemplating this question. So often leading people to view the intuitive eating concept of unconditional permission to eat as synonymous with eating with abandon (which it’s not) and making doughnuts the unofficial symbol for intuitive eating.

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