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If you have been looking into intuitive eating – that is great! It has terrific benefits from healing your relationship with food to saying goodbye to diets forever. But there are some things to understand before you start intuitive eating.
What to Know Before You Start Intuitive Eating
You Can’t Focus on Intuitive Eating and Weight Loss at the Same Time
This fact is one of the most important things to understand about intuitive eating. It is NOT a diet, nor is it a way to learn how to control your portions to help you lose weight. If you have a goal of weight loss, intuitive eating will not work for you. You have to come to a place of body acceptance, where you fully accept that your body may not get smaller, and might even get a little bigger before everything balances out. If you can’t do that, you won’t be able to embrace eating intuitively entirely.
This is Not a Linear Process
Intuitive is not linear, like most things in life. There are ebbs and flows, good days, and bad days. One day, you might feel like you have a handle on it, and your appetite is getting back to normal, and the next day you feel ravenous and out of control with food. This is all normal and part of the process. Don’t give up! Just keep going and learning. Trust your body, follow your cravings, and understand that it will all lead you toward a life free of diets.
You Won’t Feel Out of Control Forever
That feeling of being out of control around certain types of food if you aren’t tracking won’t last forever. It can cause a lot of fear and anxiety in the beginning, especially if you feel like you have a history of food addiction and overeating. If you are used to restricting food and writing down every single calorie and carb, it feels scary to let all that go suddenly.
But the feeling of being out of control doesn’t last forever. You have to learn how to follow your body’s cues and trust it to guide you in the right direction.
Finding a Good Support System is Crucial
From the very beginning of your intuitive eating journey, you need to have people who will support you. You don’t have to tell everyone what you are doing but find at least one person you trust who you can talk to about it. Someone who won’t judge you, who won’t throw diet talk in your face, and who isn’t going to trigger you in any way. On the opposite end, you may need to distance yourself from people who are deep in diet culture.