Here’s the real talk: the intuitive eating journey starts with food, but it doesn’t end there. On the surface, it sounds like eating what you want, however much you want, when you want it. But it’s so much more than that. It’s also about honoring your health needs without the rigid, all-or-nothing mindset of diet culture, and recognizing and trusting your body’s cues.
It’s also about having just as much freedom to say NO to food when you’re not hungry or you’re already full as it is to saying YES to that delicious-looking cupcake. The real goal is not just eating freely, but living freely. Learning how to break free of the rules and judgement diet culture imposes helps you be fully present in your life.
Today, let’s uncover the beliefs diet culture has trained us to believe, and find the 4 missing pieces you need to create lasting food freedom on your intuitive eating journey.
Diet Culture’s Rules versus Intuitive Eating’s Freedom
Diet culture imposes a lot of external rules. There’s rules about how many calories you can have in a day, when you can eat, even which foods you can eat. At the core, it’s all about control. Diet culture says that if you control yourself enough, you’ll be able to lose weight and keep it off.
The ironic part is the more you try to control, the less in control you feel. Sure, you can eat “healthy” for certain periods of time, but the more you try to hold onto control, the harder it feels. Eventually, you break into the bag of Oreos at midnight because you can’t resist the craving any longer. And instead of acknowledging that you’re human and sometimes you want a cookie, you feel guilty because you “lost control.”
On the other hand, intuitive eating leans into your body’s inner wisdom. That doesn’t mean it’s a food free-for-all, but listening to your body and honoring its nutritional needs while enjoying satisfying food without feeling guilty. Intuitive eating takes into account your specific hunger and fullness cues as well as your emotions and any medical symptoms. Essentially, you learn to tune into exactly what your body needs instead of trying to control it.
But breaking free of diet culture’s cycle goes beyond food freedom. There are four other pieces you must first address to fully embark on your intuitive eating journey.
The 4 Missing Pieces of Lasting Food Freedom
While food plays a major role in intuitive eating, it’s only a piece of the puzzle. For full food freedom, you need to take four big steps forward to create lasting change that serves you in the long run.
Body Image Healing: Making Peace With Your Reflection
The first step? Making peace with your body. This is different from body positivity or body love. This step can be difficult because you may feel like you can’t feel this way about your body until your weight is lower. Or that you have to be full, “Wohoo, I love my body!” to make this happen. This still puts a heavy emphasis on how you feel about your body, but instead of truly healing your body image, you’re building a house of cards. The moment something changes, that house of cards crumbles.
But if you aim for neutrality, then there’s not so much pressure to feel a certain way. Neutrality means learning how to exist in harmony with it. If you happen to feel grateful for it, wonderful. But accepting the body that you have and treating it with kindness and respect on any given day — even on the days you wish your weight was lower — is exceptionally powerful.
Diet culture weaponizes body shame to keep us stuck in its cycle. Diet culture doesn’t actually care about your health. The unspoken part is that body shame makes the diet industry almost $100 billion a year. Nobody’s really profiting off you feeling content or even just neutral about it. Here are a few real strategies to detach your self-worth from your body size:
- Write down 10 traits or qualities you have that describe you that aren’t about your appearance. Who are you as a whole person? Get in touch with who you are, not the size of jeans you wear.
- Spend some time each day practicing body gratitude for what your body does. Even if you don’t love the way you look, what can you be grateful for about your body?
- Take a break from the scale. That chunk of metal is not a measurement of how worthy you are as a person. It just measures your gravitational pull. That’s it.
- Wear clothes that fit. You deserve to have clothes that fit your body as it is right now. Focus on what fits and feels the best instead of the size of the clothing. ThredUp is a great way to send in clothes that don’t fit and get credit for new clothes you’ll love.
Emotional Resilience: Coping Without Turning to Food (or Creating Food Rules)
Emotional eating itself is not inherently isn’t bad, but if it’s your only coping tool, it can feel out of control. And listen, food as a coping mechanism is in everyone’s emotional coping toolbox. That’s fine. But you need to have a variety of coping tools you can reach for when you need support. Otherwise, you’ll go beyond what your body actually needs.
You might think the solution to this is restricting your emotions, but I have to be honest with you: that can be just as harmful as food restriction. Your emotions are messages from your soul telling you what you need. When unfelt feelings get bottled up inside, they boil over and often result in the urge to eat.
So what can you do when emotions show up and food feels like the only answer?
- Pause. Notice what’s happening in your mind and body.
- Ask yourself what you need outside of food. What are you thinking, avoiding, feeling?
- Set a timer for 20 minutes. If you still want to eat when the timer goes off, go for it. But in those 20 minutes, try to identify the emotion and what you truly need.
Taking this pause to get curious allows you to truly tap into what’s going on and what you need.
Joyful Movement: Moving for Pleasure, Not Punishment
A lot of my clients have told me, “I don’t like exercise and I don’t think I ever will.” If you’re feeling that way too, know it’s not uncommon. Many people have a love-hate relationship with exercise. If possible, I invite you to think of movement as a pleasure.
If that’s not currently available, consider connecting it with another purpose instead of punishment. Maybe it’s a way to connect with your body, to improve your heart, or even boost your energy and mental focus. Aligning movement to reasons that feel important to you will help it feel less daunting and less like a punishment for your body.
It’s important to heal your relationship with exercise as well as food when you’re starting your intuitive eating journey because simply, weight loss culture has had a toxic grip on movement. It’s time to reclaim movement from “no pain, no gain,” or burning calories. It can be a way to get in tune with your body and reclaim your life.
Movement doesn’t have to be the gym. It can be a Taylor Swift at-home dance party, an at-home yoga session, an afternoon walk with your kids. There are so many things you can do to find movement that you’re neutral with, or even enjoy.
Community & Support
In my experience, these are the hidden keys to intuitive eating success. I tried to go it alone on my own journey for many years. Doing it alone just makes it harder because you don’t have the camaraderie or the mirror back to see when your diet mentality is still in charge.
Think about some ways you can engage with a community you’re already a part of or find one. This can be in your real life, whether it’s a like-minded sister or a friend. It can be hard to make those connections in real life, so find community online. Facebook groups are a great place to start because they can be centered around that community (that’s why I created the Intuitive Eating Made Easy group). Find a community that cheers you on, that gets it, that’s there for you.
Final Thoughts
Food is important on your intuitive eating journey, but it’s just the beginning. To find true food freedom and live your life fully, add these four missing pieces into your life. If you’d like support through the process, I would love to help. Non-Diet Academy is open for enrollment right now.
In case no one’s told you today, you are worthy, just as you are.
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