Live less out of habit and more out of intent.

Disordered eating, emotional eating, overeating, restrictive eating and any sort of food fear or food anxiety can feel habitual and make you feel stuck.  There is often a conditioned response to food and, essentially, we hope to help you condition a new response – one that feels flexible, curious, open and accepting.  While you might feel powerless, the very act of practicing makes new and effective neural pathways and makes less effective ones less powerful.

Never underestimate the power of pausing, taking a deep breath and then reacting…

Below are the 10 principles of Intuitive Eating.  These principles can help you to feel more comfortable and at peace with your relationship with food .. helping you to create HEALTHY habits that can last a lifetime.

1.  Reject the Diet Mentality

• Make a firm commitment to give up dieting for the rest of your life.
• Reject the feelings of failure of dieting and gaining the weight back. It is the diet that doesn’’t work, not you.

2. Honor Your Hunger

• Keep your body biologically fed with adequate energy, carbohydrates, and fat. Otherwise, you will trigger a drive to overeat.
• Honor the first biological signs of hunger to develop trust with yourself and food.

3. Make Peace with Food

• Give yourself unconditional permission to eat whatever you really like.
• Restriction isn’t a solution for chaos, it causes it.

4. Challenge the Food Police

• Scream a loud no to the voice that declares you are “good” for eating less than 1,000 calories and “bad” for eating a piece of chocolate cake.

5. Feel Your Fullness

• Listen for the body signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry.
• Observe the signs that show you are comfortably full.

6. Discover the Satisfaction Factor

• In our fury to be thin and healthy, we often overlook one of the most basic gifts of existence, –the pleasure and satisfaction that can be found in eating.
• Eating good food in a good environment will help you to feel satisfied and content. You will find that it takes much less food for you to feel full.

7. Cope with Your Emotions Without Using Food

• Find ways to comfort, nurture, distract, and resolve your issues without using food.

8. Respect Your Body

• Accept your genetic blueprint and work with it rather than against it
• Feel better about who you are and avoid being overly critical of your body shape.

9. Exercise: – Feel the Difference

• Forget militant exercise. Just get active and feel the difference. Shift your focus to how it feels to move your body rather than needing to lose weight.
• Make exercise convenient and fun incorporating it into your lifestyle.

10. Honor Your Health: – Gentle Nutrition

• Make food choices that honor your health and taste buds while making you feel well. A healthy choice is one that feels good while you are eating it and after.
• Remember that you don’t have to eat a perfect diet to be healthy. Progress, not perfection is what counts. It is the whole diet, not just one individual meal or snack.

Adapted from a blog post written by: Emily Fonnesbeck