Thoughts on IE

I actually posted this on Minimins but I wanted to keep it for my own reference.

Intuitive eating is not about eating piles of junk. It is about listening to your body, listening to your intuition and listening to what it tells you about when you are hungry and what it wants you to feed it.
Intuitive eating is also known as normal eating. It is about just eating normally, without diets giving us rules, without listening to compulsions formed by emotional problems, without punishing it by eating too much or for the wrong reasons, without depriving it of foods that bring us pleasure simply because Dr. X says it is "bad" for us. If a food is wrong for your body, your body lets you know.

If your body says "please feed me healthy foods" then to feed it healthy foods would be eating intuitively. The task that says to bring lots of chocolate into your house is not about eating lots of chocolate because you have it, it's about normalising chocolate, removing the word "bad" or "fattening" from it, because it isn't bad or naughty, it's just a food.

Good quality chocolate has some great health benefits, and eaten in an amount that is appropriate to our own bodies, therefore a personal amount our body accepts it. Bad quality chocolate has little health benefits, if any at all, therefore our body will only accept small amounts or even nothing before it starts to let you know in varying degrees that it doesn't appreciate being filled with poor quality foods.

Allowing all foods into your diet isn't about eating all foods, it's about being allowed to eat all foods but you making the call on whether you want to eat them or not. It's about you holding the responsibility, not giving it to your Weight Watchers leader or similar. You make the call. It's your body, your food, your decision.

The Beyond Chocolate approach also includes being kind to yourself. This is a major piece of the puzzle for me. If I berate myself for eating lots of chocolate, I feel down and I end up eating again because I have internalised societies morals on eating.

We can't be moral about eating and eat intuitively. It doesn't really go hand in hand. So whilst I said it isn't about eating lots of chocolate, it is also not about NOT eating lots of chocolate. It's about listening to your body, listening to your mind and making the judgement about what you really want. It's also about overriding your body and saying "No, I want chocolate and I know it is going to make me feel rubbish in a few minutes/hours, but right now I want to eat it and I am prepared to live with the consequences" if that is what you want to do.

It is not easy to move from dieting to intuitive eating, especially when we are bombarded by dieting messages of morality from every source of the media.

Also, the Beyond Chocolate method encorporates moving your body in a way that works for you, and not focusing on the weight loss benefits but focusing on the pleasure that it can bring when you allow yourself to enjoy it, the way we enjoyed it as children when we ran in parks, played kerby or football or kiss-chase.

The other things that I have learned from BC are that it is ok to be sad or angry and that I don't have to hide those feelings. It's also ok for me to get it wrong (and by wrong, I mean eating in a way that is ignoring any intuition but eating compulsively instead - it is wrong for me, it isn't necessarily wrong for everyone) sometimes, I don't have to do it all, and when I do get it wrong I don't have to jack it all in. I have also learned that I have the chance to take responsibility for myself and that I don't have to do things the way everyone else does and I don't have to answer to anybody, and certainly not people who criticise the way I eat or how I look.

That is what intuitive eating is about for me.