Intuitive Eating - Should You Try It?

Maybe you are  eating very  irregularly, need a bag of candy every night or the weekends go uncontrollably. You are trying to control the situation by tightening controls or a new diet. You may have tried pruning control, but the result has been a complete loss of control.

It’s good to remember that only a few of us  accidentally eat well, but eating well is often the result of practice. Before you start eating intuitively, you need to have an idea of ​​what healthy eating really is. It makes sense to create a clear routine for life and certain rules for eating. This allows the body’s messaging systems (such as feelings of hunger and satiety) to function normally and makes intuitive eating much easier.

Let’s start on the following principles:

• Learn to eat regularly every 3-4 hours. Eating regularly also supports eating control. Also the screaming hunger will not come as a surprise and this will make you better choices in everyday life.
• Plan yoto work, a few bars of protein and nuts in case of surprises. If you are not passionate about cooking, outsource cooking will ensure that healthy food is available when you need it.
• Eat at least 1 handful of vegetables, berries or fruits with each meal. This hardly even needs to be justified. With this rule, you can easily eat more than 500 g of vegetables, berries and fruits every day and thus improve your intake of all vitamins, minerals and fibre.
• Eat protein with every meal (fish, egg, dairy, meat, soy, tofu, etc.). This also increases satiety, improving eating control and giving the body appropriate building blocks.
• Eat a handful of good carbs (whole grains, boiled rice or pasta, potatoes, etc.) with every meal. Adequate carbohydrate intake improves performance in everyday and sports and increases fibre intake.
• Eat a thumb-sized portion of soft fats with each meal. Use oil as a salad dressing, stir in the snack nuts or seeds.
• Learn to relax and enjoy 10-20% of the Meals. Treat yourself without a quilt.

Learn these principles of good eating one at a time. If this feels challenging at first, try to break it down into smaller parts. For example, you can try adding vegetables at first for just one or two meals. When this goes well, increase the amount of vegetables for other meals as well.

As you can see, the principles of good eating do not include prohibitions or restrictions. You don’t need a gram scale or diet to implement them. The goal is not to reduce eating, but to improve the quality of eating. You can eat plenty of quality food! When the principles of good eating are part of everyday life, eating is automatically directed in a healthy direction. Thus, you can gradually abandon the rules and start listening to more and more intuition about when and what you would like to eat.

Remember that intuitive eating is also affected by sleep and stressors. For this reason, in addition to eating, it is important to create routines that support recovery, reduce stress, and improve sleep.

From tight control to intuition

If your diet has been closely controlled for a long time, the transition to intuitive eating can seem like a scary leap into the unknown. Often the control freaks are the ones who are perhaps too aware of what a healthy diet means and strive for perfection in doing so. The diet can also be self-repeating and one-sided. Fear of reducing control often includes weight gain. However, reducing control reduces eating stress and thus makes life even more relaxed and fun.