3 Reasons Why Intuitive Eating Will Help Improve Your Health

Many diets are crafted for the sole purpose of weight loss, very rarely are diets created to help people with health problems. When many people start diets, they find that some of their health problems actually get worse. This is typically due to a side effect of restrictive eating.

That is why intuitive eating is so great, it’s not about restriction, it’s all about you and your health.

A question I am often asked by people who are thinking about starting intuitive eating is how it is going to impact their overall health. They may say something like, “Can intuitive eating improve someone’s health, such as migraines or upset stomach?”

And… the short answer is yes! Let me explain.

Intuitive eating offers numerous benefits for enhancing your overall well-being. However, for this blog, I will focus on the ways in which intuitive eating can alleviate both headaches and gastrointestinal discomfort.

Here are the 3 Reasons Why Intuitive Eating Will Help Improve Your Health:

1. Intuitive Eating is Stress-Free!

Stress is a very powerful word that has a lot of effects on your body. When you live in a chronically stressed state, the switch to your stress response, known as ‘fight or flight’, stays on. This affects you in various ways including cognitively (memory problems, difficulty concentrating), emotionally (moody, irritability, depression), behaviorally (sleeping problems, social withdrawal), and physically (bowel irregularities, nausea).

What causes stress? Dieting! Hands down, calorie counting, restricting food, tracking points, and logging your food into an app all cause stress. And this stress triggers your internal stress response. If you continue dieting, you will stay in a stressed state and deal with the negative effects of it.

Once you decide to give up dieting and embrace the path towards intuitive eating, it’s like a ton of bricks is lifted off your shoulders. The stress disappears, and I bet you’ll see the headaches and gastrointestinal discomfort do too.

2. Intuitive Eating Results in More Consistent Eating Patterns

When you ditch eating by the clock, as most diets tell you to do (you know, all those rules that you follow), you learn to tune into your inner hunger and fullness signals. This likely results in a more consistent pattern of eating, specific to your inner wisdom. This consistency will improve the gastrointestinal symptoms you are experiencing, a.k.a. an upset stomach. And will decrease any headaches that might have come from low blood sugar due to an inconsistent eating pattern.

Another point to make is this. If you are still dieting, you probably find yourself in the restrict-binge cycle. So, you restrict foods that you deem as bad for you, but at some point, you can’t take it anymore. So, you end up eating said foods, but you don’t just have some, you overeat on those foods, leading to a binge. Then, you experience a flare in your IBS or other GI symptoms. Your mind goes right away to “You see, I can’t tolerate those foods”, but it’s the dosage of the foods you are eating, not the actual food itself.

So, give up dieting and restriction and embrace intuitive eating. You will find that you have more energy, and your stomach is digesting food just the way nature intended.

3. Intuitive Eating Encourages You to Tune Inward

When you practice intuitive eating, you are engaging in mindful eating practices along the journey. That means you are learning to slow down, savor your food, and tune in to how your body feels after you eat something. You are moving from autopilot eating into conscious eating and this allows you to attune, not only to your inner signals but also to your body’s reaction to food.

As a dieter, you listen to what the diets or health gurus tell you to eat. Many times, you don’t even enjoy it. Most of the time, you finish your meal and have had minimal to no pleasure in it. As an intuitive eater, you have rediscovered the pleasure of eating. If you had pleasure after eating when you were dieting, it was likely accompanied by guilt. That guilt turned to shame.

No more.

Without guilt and shame and food worry, you can listen to what your body tells you in terms of how it feels. Then the next time you are about to decide whether to eat a food or not, you’ll remember how you felt the last time you ate it. Did your belly hurt? Did your blood sugar plummet? These factors will then play a role in whether you decide to eat that food or not.

Wow! Isn’t intuitive eating amazing? Yes, it is!