The Thing About Intuitive Eating

...is that it sometimes is the most liberating wonderful thing I have ever done, and I am so amazed at the relief I feel when I approach food and hunger and fullness now in comparison to how I approached them for about twelve years before.

The other thing is that sometimes it gets all twisted up and it's really difficult.

Why, you ask?
Well, apart from the obvious disassociation from body cues that comes with disordered eating, our culture is designed to revolve around the idea of excess.
It's nothing new. We're constantly bombarded with the idea of keep progressing, keep going after things, keep progressing, excelling, fighting our way to be the "best version of ourselves" but that's just the newest sheep's cloak the wolf has donned. It's a new package for the same old adage that "You aren't happy unless you have what we're selling" (we can thank those dickheads on Madison avenue in the '60's for this).

How does that apply to intuitive eating?

How could it not?!

When it's so insidious that our society is saturated with the idea of "higher performance" and "living our best life" that just listening to our bodies and shutting out all the nonsense is not only going against the grain, it's bloody revolutionary.

Diet culture, the idea of self denial, the concept of cheat days and cheat meals, all of it is a way of ignoring what our body is telling us and making the very act of giving our flesh machines the nutrition and movement best for their survival into a fucking game.

Here's something you might not know,
when I was the skinniest, and the most unhealthy in my anorectic days, my mantra was not
LOSE WEIGHT. I knew I was thin. I even had the notion that perhaps I was a little too thin. I wasn't concerned with losing more weight.
The thing that kept me scribbling down every crumb I put in my mouth in a food diary and then tallying up the calories so I would make it under my goal; the drive that had me cradling my screaming, roiling, empty stomach at four in the morning when I was so hungry I couldn't sleep was that I didn't want to GAIN THE WEIGHT BACK.

So many of us who fall into truly disordered eating do so because we are only taught how to lose weight. Once we achieve our supposed goal, we may have the notion that it's okay to stop losing weight, that we might have gotten where we wanted to be and can stop now,
BUT THERE IS NO PROTOCOL FOR JUST MAINTAINING.
They call that shit "plateauing" and warn you against it.
They call it, "a crucial time for backsliding" and warn you against it.

You know why?
You know why society and diet industries won't celebrate or congratulate you for reaching some weight loss goal without encouraging you to KEEP FUCKING GOING?
Because then you stop funneling your money into their garbage products and terrible self care mindset.
You stop buying into their industry built on an elusive, impossible ideal of perfection.

I didn't know how to just eat anymore, so I just kept losing instead because I figured that was better than gaining. You know, because in our fucked up culture ANYTHING IS BETTER THAN GAINING WEIGHT EVEN IF YOU NEED TO.

GAHAHAHAHAHA.

This is the stuff that makes intuitive eating really good on most days.
It feels revolutionary to shut out all those voices.
I know you're a stay at home mom whose contributing to your income by peddling the wraps or the teas or the shakes or whatever, but your instagram pics and faux motivational posts are incredibly damaging.
I know your fitspo, or supposed body positive hashtags are getting you more likes as you whip yourself into shape for your wedding and encouraging you on your way to whatever dress size society told you it was acceptable to be on your big day (let's not even go down this rabbit hole), but it's also psychotically cruel to troll women with disordered eating histories who click #bopo hashtags looking for encouragement and bodies we can identify with, and instead are bombarded with pictures of how many calories you burned on the elliptical this afternoon.
This is the kind of stuff that people tell each other is supportive, but the only thing it supports is the "not good enough" mindset that keeps you trapped in the current of disordered eating, ignoring your body's cues, and drags you back out to sea if you don't seek actual support to deal with it.

Right now I find the best thing I can do to support myself is give voice to my cues.
Because so much of my disorder was built on secrecy and silence, saying the words, "I'm hungry," or "I need to eat now," are both terrifying and liberating for me.
I never got to say them before because hunger was a prized sensation that I clung to for validation that I was doing the work.

Now I say shit like,
"Hey, will there be food there, or should I pack a snack?"
And my bag overflows with snacks! It's not just awesome as a mother to have an unending supply of biscuits, apples, single serve peanut butters, and trail mix in my bag, but it's awesome for me too! It's there. The food is there for me if I want it! I don't have to get into the mindset of starvation and freak out later (or all day in fact) because food is not a scarcity anymore.
I have it in abundance.

Sometimes it's still difficult.
Recovery is never linear.
I have days where I just can't bring myself to eat breakfast.
I try. I make something and then I just can't put a bite in my mouth.

There are other days where I eat and eat and eat. I stand in my kitchen with the cupboards and the fridge open and I turn into a food wrecking ball.

But afterward I look at the situation with "curiosity over judgement" which is something I learned from Kylie over on Imma Eat That, which is her incredible blog.
(Maybe sometime soon I'll do a round up of the body positive blogs and babes who have really helped me? Is that something y'all would like to see?)

Anyway:
Curiosity over Judgement was a huge step forward for me.

Now, I check in myself.
Am I hungry?
Do I want to eat?
If the answer is yes, then I think, what sounds most satisfying and delicious right now? Toast and eggs? A smoothie with nine hundred vegetables? A cookie? An apple with peanut butter?
And I keep suggesting things until I get to something that I get excited about.
Then I make that, and I eat it, and I enjoy it. I force myself to taste it and to slow down. The easiest way to do this, is to share it with the baby. I find if I'm telling my bairn how delicious something is, I stop and taste it more. Then we enjoy it together. It's wonderful. It's teaching me so much more about unabashedly enjoying food because he doesn't give a fuck.
If he likes something, he eats all of it.
If he gets full, he stops.
Another incredibly magical thing that he has taught me is that shame is not a natural behavior around satisfying hunger. I love seeing how much he delights in his food. I seek to be as happy as that in my eating.

In those situations where I check in with myself and the answers are not simple, the curiosity over judgement credo is even more important.

Am I hungry?
No.
Am I really hungry, but I don't feel like eating?
Yes.
Why is that?
And then I think about what else could be going on to interfere with my desire to eat. Am I nauseated? Sick? Sad? Too anxious to eat? Each of these has a remedy, and sometimes the easiest one is just time.
Okay, I say. It's okay that you're hungry but you don't want to eat.
Let's wait half an hour and check in again.
And then I do.
Often, the feeling of not wanting to eat has changed, and I am ready to eat and I do.

Sometimes the conversation gets muddy and more complicated.
Am I hungry?
No.
Do I want to eat?
Yes.
And then I do.
And maybe I just eat one chocolate and it satisfies me and that's okay.
Or maybe I eat a whole chocolate bar and follow it with a packet of biscuits and an entire quart container of yoghurt.

The Curiosity over Judgement conversation is never more important than it is at this moment, because my disorder used to immediately berate and shame me and it would start a starving cycle to "make up for" the transgression.

After a binge, I'll ask myself,
How do you feel?
Overfull. Uncomfortable. Out of control. Ashamed.
That's okay.
It is?
Yeah. Truly. It's okay. Nobody's going to judge you here.
But didn't I fuck up? Aren't I a failure?
Failing at what? Fucking up what? Who is there to impress. It's just us, and I already told you, it's okay. You did nothing wrong.

Then I breathe.
And maybe the conversation progresses.
Maybe I have to reassure myself that I don't have to make up for the binge.
Or maybe I just keep asking myself questions until I figure out why the binge happened.
Because I don't know about you, but I binge when I'm lonely. I binge the hardest when I feel like I don't matter, like nobody cares about me, and that nothing matters.
I seek comfort in food because I am not finding it in any other person or outlet of my life.

Once I identified those triggers, it got easier to forgive myself for bingeing.
I have even managed to stop a binge halfway through, which I used to think was impossible.

The superpower of intuitive eating is being gentle with yourself and treating your "food brain" like a tender little hurt animal part of you because that's what it is.
It's a beaten down, broken little creature that society has all but destroyed, and this is you being bigger and kinder than diet culture and rescuing it.
It is worth saving, just as much as your life is worth saving.

Especially in these times where we are being told to manage our bodies more because if we aren't tying up all our time with exercising and counting calories then we aren't calling our senators or signing petitions or protesting (think about that for a second: What has your ED kept you from doing that might be really important? What's the first thing you would do if you didn't have to worry about it anymore?).

Anyway, I just wanted to share with you my own experience with intuitive eating because too many times I think people make it seem easy and straight forward and I always felt like it was something I could never do. I could never actually trust my body because society told me my body was a liar.

And then I started to stop listening to that shit and start caring for the little creature in my brain that wanted me to love myself, and as it heals and gets stronger, so do I, and that is more motivation than any stupid hashtag.

If you do nothing else,
Be kind to yourself today.