How is the #summerofintuitiveeating going for you? Now, as we land on the fifth principle and are half way through, I am feeling the impulse to pause briefly and reflect on how this process is working for me. This has been a crazy hectic summer so far, and it is showing no signs of slowing down. So, I am thankful that I made the commitment to write about each the principles, because it has forced me to take the time to reconnect with Intuitive Eating. For me, eating intuitively is an important reclamation of the trust I once had in my body (a trust we all once had) to guide me in my food and eating choices. It is tough work because, in order to hear what our body is saying to us, we have to block out the ‘in your face’ shouts as well as the undermining whispers of a body and diet obsessed culture. We do this by practicing mindfulness and learning how to attune to our bodies and honouring the wisdom it holds. And when we do that…on a deep level…worlds shift, skies open up, we reclaim our body sovereignty. There are others elements to body sovereignty, such as compassion and autonomy, which I will explore in upcoming posts.
So, mid-way through this process, I feel grateful for this time to focus on intuitive eating as a tool to help me become more mindful. For those of you out there following along, join me now in looking at the next principle:
Respect Your Fullness Listen for the body signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry. Observe the signs that show that you’re comfortably full. Pause in the middle of a meal or food and ask yourself how the food tastes, and what is your current fullness level? (text from website)
What rules guide how much you eat? Were you told to clean your plate because children are starving children in Africa? Do you decide on when to eat based on the time of day? Is lunch always a smaller meal and supper a big one? Did you grow up in a big family where you had to rush to eat and grab all you can?
Can you think of where and how your eating habits were formed?
To be honest, I don’t remember a lot of food rules in my household growing up. But I do remember being in competition with my brother to finish our first serving to be the one who got the best pickings for the second serving. I’m not sure why we did this -there were only the two of us kids and food wasn’t scarce in my family, but race through our food we did. For me, this sibling meal competition lead to a habit/need of having to have ‘seconds’ to feel satisfied with a meal, a habit that took a long time to break. I still do have seconds helpings now and then (and I give myself full and complete permission to do so whenever I wish), but I no longer do so out of habit or unconscious emotional eating. I’ve learned to respect feeling full, and most of the time choose to stop eating at that point.
Respecting fullness..in other words stepping back from eating when our stomachs tell us we have had enough, can be challenging, especially if we are a survivor of the diet or emotional eating treadmill when there is a constant threat of food restriction ahead. I know for me, nothing made me want to eat more than the thought of an impending diet, even when I tried to camouflage the diet by calling it a ‘lifestyle change’. I find this is where it is ironically helpful to really deeply and truly give yourself permission to eat. So, when I am eating a delicious lasagne I can stop when I am full because I can have lasagne again *whenever I want!*. If someone else eats up it, I can buy or make more.
There are lots of good tips and tools in the Intuitive Eating book about how to regain the ability to discern when you have eaten to fullness – check them out. A basic exercise they encourage you to do is to make a habit of pausing mid way though a meal and ask yourself how full are you feeling, and if you are still tasteing and enjoying the food. They stress that, especially at first, that you are under no obligation to stop eating when you are full, if you don’t want to. You can choose to eat, but eventually, as you become more and more assured at a deep internal level that you will be able to eat again whenever you wish to, you will get better at noticing when you are full and feeling okay with going no further with that meal.
A note of caution. This is one of those principles that can be tricky to navigate and has the danger of moving from a guideline to eating intuitively to a diet rule, in other words “I only eat when I am hungry”. The tools I referred to in the previous paragraph include a hunger scale, which can be super-helpful in reconnecting with how different hunger levels feel like, but can easily be flipped into a weapon of the Food Police, as in “what do you mean you want that muffin, your hunger level is only a 2!”. Tribole and Resch urge you to engage with a more helpful voice, such as the previously explored Food Anthropologist, to help keep the information learned from things like a hunger scale as helpful information , not ammo for self-abuse. As I mentioned in my first post introducing this series, you have to be careful of many diet gurus out there who have co-opted the framework of intuitive/mindful eating and selling it as a weight loss tool. Even in this book, Intuitive Eating by Tribole and Resch there is a slight leaning to the notion of intuitive eating leading to weight loss. It is more apparent to me now, re-reading the book many years later than when I read this book at the start of my body sovereignty journey. But I still think it is a helpful book and for the most part Tribole and Resch are supportive of embracing body diversity, but be aware of unconscious pairing of intuitive eating and guaranteed weight loss…it isn’t helpful.
Self Reflective Questions:
As you consider the idea of Respecting Your Fullness and what it means in your own life to pay attention to hunger and fullness signals, consider:
- What do you notice? What do feelings of hunger and fullness feel like to you?
- What do you feel? What emotions arise for you when you think about respecting fullness?
- What does it mean? How would respecting your fullness impact your day to day life? Change how you related to food?
- What will you do? What are some concrete actions you can take? Are you able to give yourself unconditional permission to eat? How will you work to pay attention to your body’s signals?
Thank you for reading. Next week we are moving on to exploring Principe #6: Discover the Satisfaction Factor I hope you will join me!