Learning to Trust Your Body
The idea of trusting your body can come across as absurd if you're in the midst of struggling with food. How can you trust your body when you're sure that if you let go of the reins you'd be led straight into a bag of chips and a half-dozen cookies?
The very nature of struggling with food is that you don't trust yourself around food, you are prone to feeling out of control, and you feel that you have to follow dieting rules to avoid gaining weight. When you're struggling with food, you don't believe that your body and its cues could ever lead the way.
It's hard to hear then, that it's in trusting and honouring your body where peace with food can be found. When you put down your clenched fists, your calculators and trackers, and your diet rules of the moment, you'll be paving the way to mend a broken relationship.
To start along the path of trusting your body, you must make space to believe that your intuitive cues can work for you, not against you. It means believing that your body can guide you to the right foods, at the right times, in the right amount, in a natural and intuitive way, without a need to ever compensate or make up for anything.
The issue that commonly arises with this notion is that it takes a leap of faith to believe it's possible, and that once you start down this road, it takes time.
Re-building trust after it is broken does not happen overnight.
To trust your body you have to begin to re-calibrate yourself to the cues of your body. And in order to do this, you must let go of any habits of restriction or daily calorie allotments. You cannot build trust with your body while simultaneously denying its basic energy requirements for the needs of your 'now' body.
Once you start eating adequately, you can learn the intricacies of your own hunger and appetite sensations, and answer to them with food. It's a communication- a nudging, an asking, or a needing that is honoured instead of silenced, manipulated, deprived or controlled.
As you re-develop this communication, something interesting happens. Those inner cues of hunger become more accurate of what you'd like to eat. Sometimes that's corralled by what's available, what you've already packed, or what you have time for. But sometimes, when given free reign, you'll be able to notice that you want something savoury and salty, or warm and soft, something sweeter, or something fresh and crunchy. Sometimes you'll feel the need for a lot of food and go back for seconds, and sometimes you'll be having a day when you don't feel like eating much.
This is the inner wisdom of your body. And believing that this wisdom is possible for you is the pre-cursor to moving along this path.
Intuitive eating and trusting your body means moving from a rational, control-centred approach, toward a deep innate wisdom that comes from a part of your body that doesn't know what a calorie or carb is.
This kind of eating is possible for everyone. This kind of relationship with food is possible for you too. Reach out if you'd like support.
To learn the 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating here.