Eat what you want, when you want it!
Hey guys! I decided not to do a late post last night because I didn’t get pictures of everything I ate. I was exhausted from the trip up to Stanford University and skipped my strength workout too. So it just felt silly to do an entire post of words listing what I’d eaten for the day. Bor…ing!
As all of you cool cats know, I’ve started living the Intuitive Eating Lifestyle and I was stoked to hear how interested so many of you were about it. Welcome to inTUEative Tuesday, 1 day a week where I’ll recap my progress and talk about a little piece of the Intuitive Eating (IE) concept.
Before we talk Intuition……….
Breakfast
This morning I was actually hungry when I woke up!! Sure sign I’m doing something right.
I made 4 slices of my little bacon halves, 1 fried egg, 1 slice of Rudi’s GF cinnamon raisin toast with dairy free butter and a mug of awake tea and soymilk.
I also have a 4 mile run on the 1/2 Marathon Agenda Today!
Eat What you Want!!!
I want to preface, dieting really works for some people!!! Dieting hasn’t worked for me. I’ve taken dieting to a bad place and I have chosen to remove dieting from my life. Please don’t take my statements in a negative way toward your own food choices and personal diet preferences. Do whatever works for you!!
For me, the first step of eating intuitively is to simply eat what you want, when you want it. It sounds so simple right?!?! Well it’s actually pretty hard. Along with eating what I want, I have to get rid of any feelings of guilt from years of dieting. I have to forget portions and just eat. I have to say, it feels amazing and so much less stressful now that I have a week of practice out of the way.
Why do I have to do this? It sounds kinda counter productive…
Well from 7 years of dieting and trying to control every piece of food I eat, I’ve developed a lot of bad dieting habits. My body is also in “survival mode”. Dieting makes the body say OMG! It’s a famine and there isn’t enough food. Conserve to SURVIVE!!! Consistently under consuming calories makes the body’s metabolism become more efficient with less energy. So, it’s natural then to over consume after a period of dieting. This can be called a binge.
I definitely binged after dieting. After feeling starved the body wants fuel so it’s an innate response is to eat everything in sight because you don’t know when there will be food again. Eating what you want, when you want it is training my body and brain to know that food is readily available. I can stop eating that burrito since I’m satisfied and know I can have something else an hour or two later if I’m hungry. Holy Cannoli, it’s Rocket Science!!!!
Do you see the vicious cycle dieting has put me into?!?!
My Progress in Week 1
I feel like it’s been a HUGE success!
My main focus this last week was to get rid of all my negative thinking. Don’t feel guilty after eating something that I once would have considered bad. Don’t worry about any calories or nutrition content and just eat. Follow my body’s signals and eat. I wasn’t worried about over consumption this week.
Yesterday was the best day I’ve had in terms of intuitive eating. I wasn’t hungry at all at breakfast so I chose some tea with soymilk and bought a gluten free bar to munch on mid morning incase hunger struck. Which it did!
Lunch was with my coworkers at Erik’s Deli and I was mildly hungry! SCORE. I ordered exactly what I wanted, a Sweet Liberty Sandwich minus cheese on GF bread. I also had a bag of Dirty Sweet Potato Chips. I ate all the chips because they were calling to me and after half my sandwich I was really satisfied so I saved the rest of my sandwich for later.
2 hours later I was munching my leftover sandwich because I was actually hungry!! And an hour after that I ate a few nut clusters which kicked my hunger until dinner at 8:30pm.
Dinner was on the road with my basketball team. We stopped at Chipotle on the way back from Stanford. I had my usual veggie bowl with no cheese or sour cream. One of the tips in the Intuitive Eating book was to eat half, take a break and assess. I took a trip to the bathroom just to give my mind a second to asses if I was satisfied, still hungry or full. I really wanted the rest of my bowl so I ate it. I had a small two bites of brownie when I got home and I didn’t think about food at all the rest of the night! It felt so good to not be thinking about food all the time.