Awhile back I stumbled across this website called Intuitive Eating. I was drawn in by its name and soon became glued to what this website had to say. The authors of this website are Evelyn Tribole & Elyse Resch. Their goal is to help individuals create a healthy relationship with food, mind and body. Check it out for more information.
In today's society with a lot of unrealistic influence through the media and what not… it’s so difficult to be happy with ourselves and have a healthy relationship with food. There are sooo many fad diets out there that will make you loose weight instantly (or they claim that anyways), we try them, lose the weight and then just as quickly as we lost it, we put it back on. All of this crazy dieting is what creates the unhealthy relationship with food. What we really need is just to eat healthy, exercise and not be afraid to indulge now and then. Well, this is all easier said than done and takes a lot of training with the mind.. On this website they share what the 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating are. I just wanted to share a few of those with you today that hit home for me.
1. Reject the Diet Mentality Throw out the diet books and magazine articles that offer you false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently. Get angry at the lies that have led you to feel as if you were a failure every time a new diet stopped working and you gained back all of the weight. If you allow even one small hope to linger that a new and better diet might be lurking around the corner, it will prevent you from being free to rediscover Intuitive Eating.
2. Honour Your Hunger Keep your body biologically fed with adequate energy and carbohydrates. Otherwise you can trigger a primal drive to overeat. Once you reach the moment of excessive hunger, all intentions of moderate, conscious eating are fleeting and irrelevant. Learning to honour this first biological signal sets the stage for re-building trust with yourself and food.
3. Make Peace with Food Call a truce, stop the food fight! Give yourself unconditional permission to eat. If you tell yourself that you can't or shouldn't have a particular food, it can lead to intense feelings of deprivation that build into uncontrollable cravings and, often, bingeing When you finally “give-in” to your forbidden food, eating will be experienced with such intensity, it usually results in Last Supper overeating, and overwhelming guilt.
4. Respect Your Fullness Listen for the body signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry. Observe the signs that show that you're comfortably full. Pause in the middle of a meal or food and ask yourself how the food tastes, and what is your current fullness level?
5. Respect Your Body Accept your genetic blueprint. Just as a person with a shoe size of eight would not expect to realistically squeeze into a size six, it is equally as futile (and uncomfortable) to have the same expectation with body size. But mostly, respect your body, so you can feel better about who you are. It's hard to reject the diet mentality if you are unrealistic and overly critical about your body shape.
I am not sure how many of you out there can relate to any of these principles but for me it was bang on and I have really applied a lot of this to my life in the past year and half. I started running about two and half years ago and that was the beginning of overcoming some really unrealistic expectations of myself. Stumbling across this information was the rest of what I needed to help me be more realistic with myself. Not that I am completely in the right place yet but very well on my way.
We can not all look the same or be the same. We were all individually created and each have our own uniqueness that we should embrace and be proud of.
Over the weekend, I was finally able to get out for a nice ride on my new ride!
After a nice 30 km (18.75 m) I decided that the bike will do and that my butt was pretty sore!!
I hope everyone had a great weekend and that Monday treats you well!
What was something you did over the weekend that was different?