Every year, millions of us go on diets. For many of us, long-term weight loss proves to be a difficult goal to achieve and most who manage to lose weight eventually put it back on. So, it's not surprising that some people are turning to non-diet approaches to eating to help their relationship with food.

Those non-diet approaches, include intuitive eating a nutrition philosophy that encourages practitioners to eat mindfully and pay attention to their body’s internal hunger cues. Rather than counting calories, intuitive eaters focus on nurturing the body rather than on the biology of starvation.

Intuitive eating is a philosophy of eating that makes you the expert of your body, and its hunger signals. Essentially, it’s the opposite of a traditional diet. It doesn’t impose guidelines about what to avoid and what or when to eat. Instead, it teaches you that you are the best and the only person to make those choices.

Research suggests that intuitive eating may not be an effective weight loss strategy, but it does appear to have other physical and mental health benefits such as improved cholesterol levels, blood pressure and reduced markers of inflammation. In terms of mental health, intuitive eating is associated with improved body image, lower levels of depression, and self-esteem.

Reconnecting with your body

Anyone can potentially benefit from intuitive eating, but it might be particularly helpful for people who have trouble listening to their internal body cues, including people with a history of chronic dieting.

To help people reconnect with their bodies, intuitive eating encourages them to pay attention to the effects that different foods and eating habits have on their feelings of hunger and fullness, energy levels and attention span and mood. This includes exploring food cravings, by pausing and reflecting on what’s driving cravings, before acting on them.

How to start intuitive eating

The idea is that you should eat when you’re hungry and stop when you’re full. Though this should be an intuitive process, for many people it isn’t.

To eat intuitively, you may need to relearn how to trust your body. To do that, you need to distinguish between physical and emotional hunger:

Physical hunger

This biological urge tells you to replenish nutrients. It builds gradually and has different signals, such as a growling stomach, fatigue, or irritability. It’s satisfied when you eat any food.

Emotional hunger

This is driven by emotional needs. Sadness, loneliness, and boredom are some of the feelings that can create cravings for comfort foods. Eating then causes guilt and self-hate.

The bottom line

Over time, intuitive eating can help people develop more positive relationships with food and their own bodies.
With intuitive eating, how you eat is just as important as what you eat. Intuitive eating is a method for helping you move closer to becoming a normal eater, someone who doesn’t obsess or stress about food, but enjoys a variety of food and eats at regular intervals.

Source: https://www.healthline.com/