5 Ways Practicing Intuitive Eating Positively Affects Other Areas of Your Life

Intuitive eating is a powerful tool for recovery not only because it is a complete paradigm shift in one’s relationship with food and one’s body, but also because embracing this paradigm shift implicitly generates change in other areas of one’s life. Following are five (5) specific areas of life where I’ve both personally and professionally seen intuitive eating foster positive transformation.

1. Values
   Intuitive eating helps you practice living in alignment with your values.

   Practicing intuitive eating means you spend a lot more time checking in with your thinking, your needs, and your feelings, and then making decisions from there. Intuitive eating also often means making those decisions even when they feel like they are in direct conflict with external “shoulds.” These “shoulds” can be larger societal messages about “how a woman with a body like yours ‘should’ exercise” or more personal “shoulds” like hearing your mom’s voice chiding you: “‘should’ you really have seconds?” Intuitive eating often means acknowledging those “shoulds” and then gently bringing yourself back to making a choice that is in alignment with your thinking, your needs, and your values. The more you practice this values-aligned decision making around food and your body, the easier it becomes to extend this approach to other areas of your life. Soon, you’re living in alignment with your values as it pertains to food and your body, but also as it pertains to your work, your family, and your relationships.

2. Your Relationships
   Intuitive eating helps you deepen your relationships.

   Sharing your feelings is tough when you’ve spent so long avoiding them using funky food behaviors. Intuitive eating asks us to start listening to and honoring those emotions you’ve long avoided as part of the journey to disrupting disordered behaviors. When you can name and feel comfortable exploring your emotions, it's easier to communicate what is going on to your loved ones so that they can support you. Surprise! Vulnerability, when respected and reciprocated, deepens relationships. Now your partner can show up for you because you’ve clued them into what is going on, thereby deepening the relationship.

3. Self-Advocacy
   Intuitive eating is, at its heart, a practice of self-advocacy.

   Intuitive eating is a practice in truly identifying and naming your wants and needs and then giving yourself permission to reach for them. An intuitive eater identifies what kind of food she needs and then allows herself to eat it. An intuitive eater also drops into themselves to notice what their body desires and then gives themselves permission to own that desire. Naming your needs and then reaching for them is the definition of self-advocacy.
   

4. Boundaries
   Intuitive eating requires practicing boundary definition to maintain one’s well-being.

   Oftentimes, engaging in intuitive eating in a world that is saturated with diet-culture messaging means enacting some pretty strict boundaries to protect your well-being. These boundaries can be about things like what you consume on social media, but it can also be more personal like letting your family know that comments on food/your body are never welcome. While scary at first, especially for those of us who (like me) who are people-pleasers, communicating your wants and needs surrounding the topic of food and body helps us practice setting boundaries in other areas too. Saying, “No, I do not want to do whole-30 with you, please stop asking” is also practice for saying  “No, I’m not available for emergency 3 AM phone calls every night.”
   

5. Flexibility
   Intuitive eating invites you to stop using rigidity as a tool for self-regulation.

   Diet-culture thrives in all or nothing thinking. The food police tells us “X food is always bad” and exercise sergeants say, “Only Y-long workouts count.” We dismantle this either/or thinking when we practice intuitive eating and allow more flexibility into our lives. With intuitive eating, we examine where we learned that X food is always bad and consider how villainizing that food is worse than any supposed harm eating it could cause. We practice self-compassion and notice when a lighter form of exercise is in the best-interest of our mind and body’s needs. When you start to challenge the black and white messaging in diet-culture, you start to notice it everywhere else as well. This increased flexibility allows us to generate the space, grace, and compassion that is more reflective of this messy world we live in. We stop putting food in boxes. That practice helps us to stop putting ourselves in boxes, which, in turn, empowers us to stop putting others into boxes too.

Are you ready to start practicing intuitive eating and to begin experiencing growth in these other areas of your life as well? Intuitive eating counseling might be a right fit for you. Drop me a line and we can connect to see if counseling is right for you!