Happy New Year! Welcome back and I hope you all had a great festive period! Of course with the new year I’m sure you are seeing an influx of people talking about weight loss and that new diet that they just started. If you’re new you may be wondering what else can I do that helps me to become the healthiest version of myself without the worry of weight? Well intuitive eating and non-diet approaches is one way!
Non-Diet Approaches
Non-diet approaches are simply looking at health without looking at dieting. Helping someone to eat freely, exercise in the way they want without the pressure of weight loss. This does encompass intuitive eating which is a set of principles that people can work through in order to recover from the diet culture that we live in.
Intuitive Eating
This concept has 10 main principles that all work towards eating and moving in ways that feel right for your body. While there is an order to the principles and some are set in stone as to when you will work on them, the concept is fluid and you will jump around the different principles depending on what your non-diet professional thinks you need to work on.
- Principle 1: Reject the diet mentality
- Principle 2: Honour your hunger
- Principle 3: Make peace with food
- Principle 4: Challenge the food police
- Principle 5: Discover the satisfaction factor
- Principle 6: Feel your fullness
- Principle 7: Cope with your emotions with kindness
- Principle 8: Respect your body
- Principle 9: Movement – Feel the difference
- Principle 10: Honour your health – gentle nutrition
For more in depth information on these 10 principles and what they cover click here to the OG intuitive eating website! But I will be covering them in blog posts.
When working with clients I will always start with the reject the diet mentality and slowly work our way through the other principles depending on their individual needs. As said before this is not a rigid programme and people may need to go back and work on principles that have already been worked through if they are struggling.
The last principle, gentle nutrition, is essentially the nutrition side of non-diet approaches. It is the last principle that we will work through once we feel that the client has progressed enough through the other principles. Read more about gentle nutrition HERE
Non-diet approaches are just another way for people to become comfortable in themselves without the fatphobic and weight centric mindset that you see so often in the media. This is a way for people to become confident in their body and food choices, to gain a better relationship with themselves and food.
Intuitive eating may seem impossible, but when we were young this is something that we did very easily. It is throughout our time growing up with the focus on looking a certain way that causes us to lose touch with our body and what it needs.
I know what you are thinking, but won’t I just eat fun foods all the time? To begin with, yes. But slowly as we work through the principles, you’ll understand what your body needs to FEEL good and will start to eat nutritious food that makes you feel good. The same with movement, you’ll understand what movement makes your body feel strong and makes you feel more energised and relaxed!
Intuitive eating looks different for everyone. And there is no right way to eat intuitively. It’s a complicated principle that deep dives into why we eat certain things, looking at our emotions and how this affects our eating patterns. It’s all about understanding our bodies, noticing how we feel and how this affects us without judgment.
Why Should I Think About Trying Intuitive Eating?
This is a research backed principle and has been around for about 20 years. Research has shown that weight loss doesn’t help body image. And the pursuit of weight loss can actually cause someone to regain the weight that they originally wanted to lose.
Diet culture is so ingrained in society that children as young as 6 years old start to feel like they need to be thin (for girls), or more muscular (boys) in order to be more desirable.
Not only is it scary to think that 5 year old children are already feeling like they need to change their bodies, body dissatisfaction is a huge predictor of disordered eating later in life.
Being personal for a second, but I don’t think that we should feel like the only way for us to be happy if to lose weight and to have a constant cycle of losing and gaining weight and forever being dissatisfied with our body and having dieting be the only thing we think about.
Final thoughts –
intuitive eating and non-diet approaches is another tool to help people find their version of health. For those who have a good relationship with food and their body they may not need to go through these principles. Non-diet professionals aren’t and won’t force you to do this if it is something that you don’t want to do or are ready for, this concept is going away from what society says we should do. Deep diving into our emotions and our relationship with food and ourselves and it is not easy. But we will be here when you are ready.
If you want more information please book in a discovery call or head over to Our Programmes
[…] For more on Intuitive Eating, refer to this post. […]