Introduction
The dynamic integration between mind and body is known as intuitive eating. It comprises ten principles which is an evidence-based and mind-body health approach. To meet an individual's physical and psychological needs, eating acts as a personal process of honoring health by listening and responding to direct messages of the body. The principles work through interoceptive awareness, which includes cultivating or removing obstacles to body awareness. Nowadays, intuitive eating is growing popular in both research and the media. But only some people become frustrated due to adopting their work-by-diet culture in social media. Intuitive eating is a weight-neutral model with a scale of correct assessment.
What Are the Ten Principles of Intuitive Eating?
1. Everyone Should Reject the Diet Mentality:
- Never believe that weight loss is achieved quickly and easily through the following diet books and magazine articles.
- People have a right to be angry if a diet promotes weight loss and gains weight after stopping the new diet.
- Individuals will only show interest in following intuitive eating if they give hope or encourage them to pursue a new diet plan or nutrition for weight loss.
2. Honoring Individual’s Hunger:
- Every individual should biologically feed their body with adequate energy and carbohydrates, or they can trigger overeating as a primary task.
- Moderate and conscious eating lasts only for a concise duration once the individual reaches the moment of excessive hunger.
- One should learn to honor their first biological signal to rebuild trust in individuals and food.
3. One Should Make Peace With Food:
- People can get an intense feeling of deprivation, leading to uncontrollable cravings due to the strong sense of avoiding particular foods.
- So everyone should give unconditional permission to eat.
- Eating forbidden food experience with intensity results in overwhelming guilt, and last-supper overeating occurs only due to individual try-in choice.
4. Everyone Should Challenge Food Policies:
- Never scream out loud when an individual declares themselves "good" by eating minimum calories and "bad" by consuming a piece of chocolate cake.
- The food police should monitor unreasonable rules created for diet culture.
- The essential step to returning to intuitive eating will be chasing away the food police.
5. Satisfaction Factor Is Discovered:
- Pleasure, the main goal of healthy living, is wisely discovered by Japanese people.
- Every person overlooks the basic gifts of existence, pleasure, and satisfaction to compel with the diet culture, which can be found in the eating experience.
- People derive pleasure from when and what they want to eat; inviting the environment will be a powerful source in helping to feel satisfied and content.
- Intuitive eating makes people feel enough by experiencing the intake of the right amount of food for them.
6. An Individual Should Feel Fullness:
- One should trust themselves to eat the desired foods to feel the honor of fullness.
- Listening to their body signals tells them they are no longer hungry. And feel comfortably full by observing the signs.
- Individuals' current hunger levels and food tastes are determined by asking themselves to stop in the middle of eating.
7. An Individual Should Control Their Emotions With Kindness:
- Emotional eating is seen in individuals who lose their control physically and mentally, so first recognize the food that causes this and find ways to comfort, nurture, and distract to resolve the issues.
- People usually experience emotions like anxiety, loneliness, boredom, and anger.
- These feelings are not fixed or solved by the foods, so distract people from pain or numb the pain by giving comfort for a short duration.
- It only makes people feel worse in the long run if people eat for emotional hunger.
- At last, everyone should deal with the source of emotion.
8. Everyone Should Respect an Individual Body:
- Every individual should accept their genetic plan. For example, if a person's shoe size is eight, and if an individual insists they take size six means it is uncomfortable for them.
- In the same way, similar experiences will be seen in body size patterns. So always, one should respect their body and feel better about who they are.
- Most people have unrealistic expectations and are overly critical about their body size and shape because of a hard feeling of rejecting the diet mentality. So everybody should deserve dignity.
9. Individuals Should Feel the Difference in Movement:
- Just be active and feel the difference in activity by forgetting the exercise.
- People should not focus on the calorie-burning effect of exercise, but they need to concentrate on the body's movement.
- Focusing on how they feel during the workout results in being energized, which can help make a difference between rolling out of bed for a brisk morning walk or hitting the snooze alarm.
10. Individuals Should Honor Their Health and General Nutrition:
- Individuals will feel good by making food choices celebrating their health and taste buds.
- To be healthy, remember that people do not want to eat perfectly.
- From one day of eating one meal or snack, people will not become unhealthy or suddenly become nutrient deficient. So it matters only to the people who constantly eat the same food products.
- So progress is defined as what counts rather than perfection.
Can an Individual Help Lose Weight by Intuitive Eating?
People should not follow intuitive eating for weight loss as they will not like this answer because weight loss is not the goal of intuitive eating. Some people say they lose weight to stop unhealthy behaviors like binge eating. But others say they gain weight by restricting or dieting for a long time. The fact is that the body will do whatever it needs to do. Intuitive eating will not make any promises, but it will follow that promises are better than relationships with the individual body and with food.
What Is the Difference Between Intuitive Eating and Mindful Eating?
Intuitive and mindful eating encourages the awareness of internal and external food-related experiences because they overlap. Every experience related to eating includes taste, emotions, and thoughts, and how the body responds to food that people pay more attention to is known as mindful eating. In contrast, intuitive eating revolves more around the ten principles of rejecting a specific diet. People can do both intuitive and mindful eating simultaneously because both help people honor their hunger and response.
Conclusion
Firstly people should refrain from encouraging and being clear about labeling the food as good or bad. Emotionally food must be equal, but nutritionally all foods are different. So one food does not make good, and the other one is bad. If everyone eats all foods, they will be emotionally equal and truly connected to their inner wisdom. Intuitive eating is a challenging process difficult to understand. Still, it helps to make peace with food and give up the needless war against an individual's body and how they eat. It is an essential part of preventing eating disorders and helps in the disease's recovery stage. So, everyone needs to get help and ideas from their therapist or dietician to follow and adopt these principles.
