Professional Documents
Culture Documents
How do you honor your health when • Unconditional permission to eat. between meals.”
you have permission to eat anything? Being able to eat intuitively takes
• Reliance on internal hunger and
How can french fries or a candy bar, practice. How long depends on many
satiety cues.
for example, be considered adequate factors, such the length of time you
choices? These questions are a source • Eating for physical, rather than have been at war with food and your
of confusion for many of my patients, emotional reasons. body, and your motivation to change.
their families, and even practitioners. Ultimately, recovery from an eating
Although most chronic dieters and
My message to them is that healthy eat- disorder means learning how to eat
disordered eaters have lost touch with
ing includes having a positive relation- normally, which includes the ability to
these skills, the good news is that they
ship with food of all kinds. This means eat a variety of foods, including “fear
can be relearned through attunement—a
that meals are not a moral dilemma foods,” which are perceived as fatten-
process of listening and responding to
resulting in feelings of guilt and shame, ing and/or unhealthy. It’s important
your body cues, rather than focusing
but rather a place to practice tuning into to work with your treatment team to
on rigid food rules. This means making
one’s inner needs and fulfilling those determine when and how to implement
decisions about eating based on what
needs in a healthy, nurturing way. In intuitive eating.
your body is experiencing. For example,
my work, I call this practice, intuitive
upon experiencing a grumbling stom-
eating. Intuitive Eating Research
ach (one of many hunger cues), you
While there are many ways of incor- Many people fear that intuitive eat-
might respond by eating a snack, rather
porating this process, there are three ing is synonymous with a junk food
than withholding food because of a
core characteristics: diet and poor health. On the contrary,
rigid rule stating, “It’s not okay to eat
EATING
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