Honor your health
Welcome to principle #10 of Intuitive Eating - Gentle Nutrition
Intuitive eating is a practice of self-love that encourages you to appreciate your body for all it has to offer and the incredible ways it works each day. People who choose to eat intuitively may see positive effects, like feeling less stress about what they eat, increased overall happiness, more gratitude towards their bodies and reduced stress about physical appearance.
Rather than focusing on food restrictions and weight loss intuitive eating teaches you sustainable skills that can change your food relationship for good. Forget yo-yo dieting and counting calories, intuitive eating allows you to eat all the foods you enjoy without obsessing. While intuitive eating might not be for everyone, many of the principles can be beneficial for improving your relationship with food.
You might be wondering why gentle nutrition is the last principle. Because with intuitive eating, nutrition is not rigid, restrictive or extreme. It’s gentle, meaning it’s flexible, fluid, permissive, forgiving, and balanced. With diet culture, nutrition is pretty black-and-white – there are lots of food rules that if broken can elicit strong feelings of guilt and shame. With gentle nutrition, there are flexible guidelines and you get to choose what works best for you.
This was an intentional move by the authors of Intuitive Eating, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch because it’s important that one has truly made peace with food before practicing gentle nutrition. It is so easy to start to turn intuitive eating into another diet. We can start to add those black and white diet rules and rigid thinking to the principles of intuitive eating, like not eating after 8pm, no refined foods, avoid carbs at all costs. With this type of rigid thinking, there’s no space for flexibility, fluidity, permission, balance or forgiveness. Once you have truly healed your relationship with food – you have full permission to eat all foods and you’ve taken the morality out of eating and food is now enjoyable and guilt free. Only then you can approach nutrition from a place of self-care, not self-control.
HOW DO I PRACTICE GENTLE NUTRITION?
You get to decide what gentle nutrition looks like to you. But here are some ideas to help get your started:
Aim for a wide variety of foods. Showing up for your body with a wide variety of foods is one of the best things you can do for your overall health. This will help to ensure that you are providing your body with a variety of vitamins, minerals and antioxidants and preventing any nutritional deficiencies, and eating a variety of foods will help you feel less restricted and deprived and can lead to greater food satisfaction. So you might say to yourself: “I haven’t really been eating that many vegetables lately or that many whole grains lately and I know those foods make me feel good so maybe tonight I’ll have a Buddha bowl”
Look at the bigger picture. Diet culture has become so obsessed with nutrition that it has us zooming in on everything at such a micro level that it is making us become obsessed. We don’t need to evaluate our nutrition and health on a meal-by-meal or day-by-day basis. Our bodies are not robots computing all of the nutrients we consumed at the end of the day and adjusting our health accordingly. One meal. One day. One week. will NOT make or break your health. Let’s zoom out and look at the bigger picture. Over the course of a week or month, did you eat a variety of foods from all food groups? In general, are you eating enough? We don’t need to zoom in when it comes to nutrition, we need to zoom out and see the big picture.
Notice how foods make you feel. Practicing gentle nutrition is not just about noticing what foods sound good but also noticing how foods make you feel. Part of intuitive eating is respecting your body and body respect involves showing up for your body by nourishing it adequately with foods that make you feel good. The warning here is that if you are steeped in disordered eating or diet culture, and morality is so tightly wrapped up in your food choices, it can be very challenging to differentiate between what truly doesn’t make you feel good vs. what you think doesn’t make you feel good because of the impurity you’ve attached to it. This is pretty complicated and worth unpacking with an intuitive eating coach if this resonates with you.
Aim for balance. When I work with clients on intuitive eating and we’re working on this principle we want to make sure we are getting adequate nutrition. Meaning getting enough of the macro nutrients that help with energy levels, satiety, and satisfaction. In reality some meals aren’t going to include all three and that’s okay, so this is a guideline, not something you have to follow at 100% of your meals.
Self-care, not self-control. Gentle nutrition is about practicing nutrition from a place of self-care, not self-control. Eat the salad because it makes you feel good and you want to nourish your body with things that make you feel good, not because you think it has less calories and will help you lose weight. If practicing nutrition principles becomes rigid and the control you’re exerting is what’s making you feel good, it’s time to re-evaluate because that’s not the essence of gentle nutrition.
If it starts to be difficult to feel the difference between control and self care ask yourself the following:
Do my eating behaviors feel balanced, fluid and expansive, or do they feel rigid, restrictive, controlling and extreme?
If I veer from the nutrition standards I have set, do I feel extreme guilt or shame?
If there was NO chance these behaviors would help me lose weight, would I still engage in them?
Remember that gentle nutrition is not a one-size-fits-all-approach. You get to decide what gentle nutrition looks like for you.
And again if this is feeling challenging, know that you are not alone It’s a deep topic and if you want to unpack it further with someone, feel free to check out my virtual coaching services.
