137. {REPLAY} 6 ways to start intuitive eating today

I'm taking a little break. Just having a few weeks off. While I do that I'm giving you the replays of some of my most popular episodes. 

Whether you've heard them before or not, I encourage you to give these replays a listen and see if you notice anything new. Just a heads up, there may be some outdated details like my previous business name and social media handles, so be sure to check the show notes for accurate information.

In this episode, we explore the ways to kickstart your journey away from dieting and into intuitive eating. 

If you have started intuitive eating, this is a good time to bring your focus back. But if you’re new to it, here are a few starting points to get going with it:

✨ How can you begin intuitive eating today?

✨ Are you aware of the impact of diet culture in your surroundings?

✨ Are you in tune with your body's cues for hunger and fullness?

✨ What does your mealtime routine look like at home?

✨ Do you give yourself intentional, focused time to eat?

✨ Are distractions keeping you from listening to your inner intuitive eater?

✨Are you mindful of what you're eating, or is it mindless eating?

✨Are you introducing foods you truly enjoy into your diet?

✨Have you decluttered your social media of negativity?

Remember, the beauty of intuitive eating lies in its pace. Take your time, embrace these principles gradually, and grow comfortable with each step along the way.

Get 'Eat From Within - The 3 Steps To Food Freedom' course totally free!

Transcript

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Hello, I am having a few weeks off, just a little break. And while I'm doing that, I'm giving you some fantastic replays of old episodes. And this is 1 of those episodes. I have picked the episodes that have been most popular. So I know you're gonna love them. If you've heard them before, have another listen, see if you hear something different. And if you haven't, then great, this'll save you having to scroll back. There might be a couple of details that have changed over time, so things like my social media handles and I used to go by LifeBite Nutrition, that was my original business name and obviously I'm not using those anymore. So if you do want to follow any links, just go to the show notes for this episode and use the links there, they will be correct. That's it, public announcement over, enjoy the episode. Welcome to the Intuitive Eating and Body Positivity podcast. I'm Terry and I'll be talking about all things intuitive eating, body positivity and health at every size, and shaking off weight stigma, diet culture and food rules so that we can all have a better relationship with food and our bodies. It's getting to that time of year where I start moaning about the weather. I'm just warning you. It's so blooming cold. It's really cold. It's like winter cold now. We were saying, you know how in the summer when the sun goes down, it gets a bit chilly? That's 1 type of cold. But this is winter cold. You know, the cold where it gets in your bones. That's what my nan used to say, well, I can feel it in me bones. It's really cold now. It's taken a real turn, this weather. But, you know, it's an opportunity to get cozy in it. That's the way you've got to see winter. Get cozy and warm and nice candles and nice smells in the house and blankets and slippers and fluffy socks and all that sort of thing nice big cozy jumpers so those are the nice things about winter so it's not all bad is it Do you want a tumble dryer update? Well, let me tell you. Oh, I can't even remember what the last update was in all fairness. So tumble dryer broke and then hubby replaced a part. So he figured out that it was probably the pump or something. So got a new pump that turned up, he fitted it. Guess what? Didn't work. And then on further inspection and research, it turns out it's probably an issue with the motherboard. I don't think that's what it's called but anyway the main kind of electronic oh god I'm sounding like a right old woman the main kind of electrical circuit is probably something to do that So when we weighed up how much it was going to cost, we decided to just buy a new tumble dryer. So yeah, anyway, I've got a new tumble dryer. Woohoo! I love new things. I don't know what it is, but I do. I love new things. So in my kitchen is a shiny new tumble dryer. And let me tell you, it's got all kinds of newfangled gadgets on it. It's got, I won't bore you with details, but I will tell you about this. It has got the water tank. Is that the right word for it? You know, in a condenser dryer, the water collects in something and then you have to empty it. Well, this water tank is in the door. It's in the door and the door's see-through so as the tumble dryers go in, the tank of water in the door is filling up so you can see it. It's amazing. My mind is easily pleased by things like this, isn't it? But it's really cool. You can see the water building up so me and my daughter stood there just watching the tumble dryer 1 day just watching it and watching the water god I really need to get a life don't I That's the height of the excitement in my life right now. But there you go. Anyway, let's talk about what you came here for. If you've looked into intuitive eating, which I hope you would have given that you are listening to my podcast, you will almost certainly know that there are 10 principles of intuitive eating. And if you haven't started intuitive eating yet, that can feel like an awful lot to take in, quite overwhelming, a lot to try and put in place at once. The good news is you don't have to do it all at once. You can just introduce bits and pieces over time as you start to understand it more, you can work with it, put more in place, that sort of thing. But The question that I get asked quite a lot is, how can I get started with intuitive eating today? Where do I start? How can I get going? There's such a lot. What can I do today to get going? This was actually a listener question that was posted in the Facebook group for me, so I'm happy to answer it. So let me give you a few ways in which you can do that so that you can get yourself off that dieting hamster wheel and into intuitive eating. First off, start noticing diet culture around you. This is really important. The majority of the reasons why we continue to think we need to lose weight and we need to diet comes from external sources. It's the social media posts that you see every day. I'll come back to that a little bit later. It's the TV shows and the films that you watch. It's all the characters that you're led to believe are fat when they're not. And I did an episode on that. So if you go back a little bit, you'll see some examples. It's the way that they cast typically idealistically beautiful people for parts, unless it suits the script of course, to make someone seem less intelligent, less attractive, lazier, that sort of thing. And then they cast the quote unquote normal people. It's the magazines that you read and their relentless criticizing of celebrities. They criticize them because they gain weight, They criticize them because their hair is gray. They criticize them because they don't have Botox. They criticize them because they dress in a certain way. All the opposite. Having too much work done, wearing too much makeup, too much tan. Celebs have to find this weird middle ground look of supposed perfection. And the praise that they get when they look a certain way, a way that pleases the media, a way that bags them the designer outfits, the sexy husband, the film roles. It all upholds this totally unreasonable beauty standard that we're constantly trying to achieve and that makes us feel like we're not good enough all the time. It's the clothes shops in town. They're limited sizing. They're skinny mannequins. They're tiny plus size departments. That's ironic, isn't it? And You get things like they'll say, you can order the larger sizes online. That's often the response, isn't it? It's the extra money you have to pay for the bigger sizes. It's the way that they don't make the same styles and patterns for bigger bodies. And that all contributes to how you think about yourself. What about conversations you hear around you, family, friends, colleagues, using words like good or bad to describe eating habits. Naughty and healthy to describe food. Talk about how much weight somebody needs to lose. Talk about their latest diet. Talk about slimming down for an event. These messages are all in advertising. TV, social media, magazines, billboards. I mean, sex sells, right? Beauty sells, thin sells, glamour sells. Living the dream isn't about being fat, not wearing makeup and wearing your comfy clothes according to marketing companies or advertisers. So have a look at the next ads that you come across and tell me if I'm wrong. These are just some of the examples, but look at the world around you and you'll see that you're constantly being fed messages about how you need to change. Once you can see this and you start to really notice that you'll be able to understand why you might be feeling less than good enough and you can start to give yourself a bit more compassion and kindness. There's a lot in how we see the world and the messages we receive and what you choose to receive. Once you start seeing and hearing all of this stuff around you, you realize how much rubbish it is. You realize how all these messages are constantly filtering into your brain. So first off, start noticing all that stuff around you. Start seeing where you're being influenced by the world around you. Because once you can take that pressure off and you know that you don't need to have those messages and you don't need to believe them, that's the main thing, you don't need to believe them, you don't need to act upon them, It'll change the way that you think about your body and what you eat and stuff like that. So then when we're talking about food and things, the next step is to start noticing your hunger and fullness. Hunger and fullness will ultimately help you to regulate the food that you eat naturally. Hunger and fullness are your body's way of saying, I need to eat or I've had enough food. But if you've been dieting for a long time, then you may not know what hunger and fullness feels like for you anymore. And this is because dieting takes away the reliance on those signals. Diets tell you what to eat, they tell you when to eat, they tell you how much to eat. They often don't give much consideration to how your body feels, and in fact often diets tell us that we should ignore hunger and eat in certain times of day only. Or that hunger means that you are reducing your calories for example and so it's to be expected. It's normal to be hungry. But it's not normal. Normal is recognising when your body needs fuel and is asking you to eat. Normal is knowing that you've had enough food and allowing yourself to stop before you become uncomfortably full because you know you can eat again when you're ready. So if you can start tuning into those hunger and fullness signals that your body's giving you, then it will help you to start to naturally regulate the food that you eat. And this will be individual to you, but here's some ideas of how your body might be showing you that it's hungry, for example. So maybe your stomach's rumbling. That's a common 1. We know that that's a sign of hunger. If your stomach's rumbling, you're probably hungry. And it's not a good sign as some influences will lead you to believe. So you don't need to let it get to that stage. Discomfort in your stomach. So maybe not a pain or something, but maybe your stomach feels a bit uncomfortable. That can be a sign of hunger. Things like headaches, lightheadedness, feeling a bit shaky. They can be signs of not having enough energy in your body, which means that you're probably hungry and you need to eat. Feeling nauseous, that can come through having an empty stomach. Maybe you get a bit grumpy and a bit irritable when you're hungry. You know, we've all heard that hangry, haven't we? We've all heard about hangry. Maybe mentally you're not quite as switched on. Maybe you've got this lack of focus. You know, when you get a bit sluggish in the afternoon because you've not really eaten all day and you've just worked and worked and worked and forgotten to stop for lunch, as you start to lose the focus for the job you're doing for example, that could be because you are hungry and what you need is some energy. Remember your brain is fueled just like the rest of you is fueled. So maybe there's a lack of focus, maybe there's low energy levels, maybe you get tired. So start thinking about the physical feelings that you're experiencing and how they can relate to how long it's been since you've eaten, for example. And also have a think about how food makes you feel after eating and whether your physical feelings and your mental focus change according to what you're eating. So those signs will help you to figure out what you need to eat, how often you need to eat, how much you need to eat, that sort of thing. And You know, as I've already said, if you've been dieting for a while, you might be a bit out of tune with that. So this might be a bit of actual active mental work that you have to do to figure it out for yourself. But once you can start seeing your signs of hunger, you can start to eat when you're hungry. And when you start to recognize how your body feels when you're getting full, you can make decisions on how much food you want to eat, that sort of thing. So that's good. Make time to eat. It's really, really important. What does life look like in your house around meal times specifically? Do you have set meal times each day or does everyone eat as and when they can? Maybe you make sure that everyone else in the house is fed, but you fit your eating in around that. Finding quality time to eat is really important if you want to be an intuitive eater. Okay. Intuitive eating is all about focusing on your eating habits. How the food makes you feel, how it satisfies you, your thoughts around food, that sort of thing. So how can you be that intuitive eater if you're not giving yourself the time and space to do it? Life is busy, I get that, but at least, at least once a day, you must take the time to eat with intention. And whether that's breakfast, lunch, dinner, just snacks, start finding the time at least once a day to sit and eat without distraction, without multitasking. It'll really help you to slow down, it'll really help you to not rush the food. You know that thing where you sometimes are rushing around and you don't even realize you've eaten, this will help stop that. That trait, that rushing around, that not realizing you've eaten can contribute to the feelings that you get that say you've got this lack of control around food or binging or grabbing the easiest option rather than consciously preparing yourself a meal or a snack. And prioritizing time can take away a lot of that, can make you feel so much more relaxed around food straight off. Now you've made the time to eat, fantastic, but now are you focusing on what you're eating or are you still mindlessly eating? It's really easy to let distractions take our focus. The kids' timetables of after school clubs, what needs doing around the house, pressures at work, that sort of thing. Or even simply just having things like the TV on. All of those things fill this space in our mind and they take away from us listening to our inner intuitive eater. So try to minimize the distractions around you when you're eating. Then you can pay attention to the food and you can ask yourself things when you're eating or when you're getting ready to eat, you can ask yourself things like how hungry are you? What food do you really want to eat? What will satisfy you physically and emotionally? You know, do you want hot or cold? Do you want sweet or savoury? Do you want crunchy or soft for example? And then when you're eating you can say are you enjoying the food as much as you thought you would? Is your hunger reducing and you're starting to feel satisfied? Or actually you're now starting to feel full and it's getting a little bit uncomfortable. Are you ready to stop eating? Or are you getting ready to stop eating soon? Are you eating slowly and enjoying it? Or are you rushing it and not even tasting it? All these things we don't really think about when we're rushing, when we're not giving ourselves the time to eat or when we're not focusing on the food. And there's so much that you can explore about eating if you can just take the focus off other things and put it onto the meal. And yes, this does include scrolling. So put your phone away for a little while, put it in a different room while you eat. All the stuff on your phone will still be there when you come back. You know, you're not going to miss out on anything. Just put your phone away and focus on your meal. Start buying foods you like as well. I know that as a dieter, there is often this list of foods that you buy regularly and probably a list of safe meals that you make. You know, the go-to list of recipes that you know will keep you on plan without too much thought. And then there's the absolutely not list. That's the foods at the supermarket you will never ever buy. The Greek yogurt, the lovely cheeses, the real butter, the crisps, the cakes, the chocolate, the avocado. But as an intuitive eater, all of these foods have a place in your diet. You have unconditional permission to eat all the foods. But the thought of introducing these foods can be really scary, right? How will you ever trust yourself to have them in the house? You'll just eat them all. You won't be able to control yourself. They'll be there 5 minutes and you'll eat it all. You won't. All right, at the beginning you might do actually, if we're going to be honest about this, you might do at the start, you might have this response that is like, whoa, now I've got all this food, I can eat it. But once your body and mind know that the food is now accessible and not restrictive, then the drive to eat it all, all of the time goes away. So start introducing the foods that you really enjoy back into your shopping list. Start with the foods that you don't feel are too scary at first. So these are the foods that you didn't have when you're on a diet, but you'd have really liked to, but the things that you won't go mad over. So maybe when you dieted, you had fat-free mayonnaise when you'd really have preferred the full fat 1. Or maybe you had watery, sugar-free, fat-free, joy-free yogurt. When what you really wanted was the really nice creamy yogurts, the 1 with a bit of flavor. You know, you can get the ones with the fruit purees and stuff in, the ones that are never okay to have on plan. You can start to do those, swap them back in. You know, the way you diet, where you swap things out, well, you're going to swap them back in. That's what we're doing. So start with the stuff that you don't find scary and that you don't find is a risk. You know, it doesn't have much risk attached to it. And then you can build up to things like having a whole chocolate gatto in your house or tubs of ice cream or multi-packs of crisps, you know, whatever that fear food is for you, when you start feeling more comfortable bringing foods that are not a diet food into your house, you can start to add these in too. And finally in my list of tips today is social media. I said I was going to come back to this and this is why. This 1 deserves a point of its own. Last but not least, please, please, please take some time to clean out your social media feeds. I know we've already looked at where diet culture is all around us, but this 1 is really important because we spend so much time on social media. It heavily affects your thinking and your behaviours. When you open the app, what do you see? Do you see body confidence, body positivity, diverse range of people, enjoyment of people's bodies, enjoyment of food? Or do you see beauty ideals and people who you are constantly comparing yourself to? People who make you feel like you're not good enough, people who make you want to change your body. Negativity, dieting, diet plans, diet meals, counting this, counting that, ways to cut this, ways to cut that, ads that make you feel like you're not good enough. These apps show you more of what it thinks you're interested in, so tell it what you want to see. Unfollow accounts that negatively affect you, or at the very least if you don't want to unfollow them, mute them. And this includes family and friends. Your mental and physical health are way more important than Auntie Jo being upset that you haven't liked her latest post about her loss on her diet this week. You know, which 1 is more important? Is it more important to you to see that post feel bad about yourself and realize that she shouldn't be dieting anyway and then you like it because you feel like you're duty bound to do that? Or is it more important that you don't bring that negativity into your headspace and instead you have things that you are inspired by, motivated by, feel good for seeing. Follow people who reinforce what you're trying to become. The accounts that make you feel secure in yourself, body positive, boosts your happiness and good mental health, reinforces what you're trying to believe around food now. And report the ads that you see that don't support your journey because you can do that. Social media has to be a safe space for you so while you're sat watching TV this evening, why not go through your accounts and start that cleanse. My social media links are in the show notes by the way so I would love to contribute to the good stuff you see in your feeds so please do give them a follow if you don't already. And I know this isn't a tip that is how to be an intuitive eater, you know, how to start eating as an intuitive eater, but it really does contribute, contribute, contributes, there's the word of the week. It contributes to how you feel about your body, how you feel about food, how you approach your eating habits. So if you want to be an intuitive eater, give yourself the positive space, the positive environment, the positivity in your life to help you become that. So there we have it. Those are my key points to starting to be an intuitive eater. Start noticing the diet culture around you. Start making time to eat. Start eating mindfully without distraction. You'd be amazed when you do that what you can find out about what you actually like and don't like eating and the foods that satisfy you and they don't. Honestly, it's quite interesting when you start that mindful process, it's really interesting what you find out about yourself. Listen to your hunger and fullness and start seeing how your body is telling you these things. That's such a big part of intuitive eating. Buy some foods you like, get those in your basket and give your social media an overhaul. It's really, really important. So I hope if you haven't started intuitive eating yet, that that gives you a few places to get going with it. And if you have started intuitive eating, then maybe that's a good time to bring the focus back. You know, if you're not quite being as intuitive as you have been, then you know, it's a nice way to rejig, recalibrate, get your focus back and yeah, start making sure those things are still in your eating habits and still in your day. On that note, I'm off to write a shopping list. Oh yes, it's that time of the week again where I have to do the food shop. Will I ever stop moaning about that? No, it's unlikely. Have a really, really, really good week, honestly. Have a really great week. I hope you can put some of these things into practice. Drop me a message, let me know if it's helpful. Drop me a message, let me know if you put any of it into practice. Yeah, Let me know how things work out for you.