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How Intuitive Eating Impacts Your Health

It’s Intuitive Eating Wednesday when I answer your questions and troubleshoot your challenges around intuitive eating and emotional eating.

This week’s Intuitive Eating Wednesday Question comes from Dorica, and it is:

“Can intuitive eating improve someone’s health, such as migraines or upset stomach?”

The short answer is yes! Let me explain.

There are 3 reasons why intuitive eating will help improve your health, specifically migraines or an upset stomach (there are many other ways your health can be improved through intuitive eating, but I am specifically answering this week’s question about migraines (or headaches in general), and GI issues).

Intuitive eating is stress-free!

Stress…. it’s a very powerful word which 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, irritable, depression), behaviorally (sleeping problems, social withdrawal) and physically (bowel irregularities, nausea).

What causes stress? Dieting! Hands down, calorie counting, restricting food, tracking points, logging your food into an app – all causes stress. And this stress triggers your internal stress response. As long as 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 does too.

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 here 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 in reality, 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.

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 auto pilot 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 in 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 the 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!

Ready to start YOUR intuitive eating journey? Just email me and say “I’m Ready!”

Revealing Your Dirty Little Secret…Night Time Bingeing

You’ve worked really hard to get the amazing body you have now. You’ve been on diet after diet but this last one was THE one. You lost the weight you wanted to, but to do that you eliminated lots of foods that you love.

You know what I mean. Bread. Simple good old-fashioned bread. The kind you make a sandwich with.

Sandwich you say? Oh, you haven’t eaten a sandwich in years. As a matter of fact, if you’re being honest with yourself, you’re probably afraid of eating a sandwich. If you eat a sandwich, your inner critic starts screaming at you that you’ll gain the weight back, you’ll get fat again, and tomorrow you’ll wake up with an additional 3 pounds on your body. Bread is bad!

Does this inner critic voice sound familiar to you?

To quite the voice, you stick to the rules you followed that helped you lose the weight. No bread. No pasta. No cookies, No ice cream. No carbs!

People admire your body, tell you how great you look, how good you are when they see you eating your salad for lunch. But when you get home after a long hard day at work, what happens?

Fatigue, hunger, deprivation all set in and you have just one cookie. But that leads to feeling guilt and shame, and then another cookie. Then you feel even more guilt, shame and alone, and that leads to finishing the cookies and binge eating for the next few minutes, hours or even the rest of the evening.

But no one knows, except you! It’s a secret you are hiding from the world. You look perfect, you act perfect, and you eat perfect. Who would know that your dirty little secret is that you binge eat at night all the foods you don’t allow yourself to eat during the day.

How can you get out of this binge eating trap?

3 Steps to Stop Binge Eating

Stop restriction yourself and allow all foods into your life again. I know this is so scary! But it’s important if you are ever going to have peace with food and your body.

Be aware when you are binge eating. Don’t numb out like you usually do. Stay present, experience it and you will find that you will stop eating before the cookie package is finished.

Breathe through it! Yes, identify the emotions you are feeling and breathe through it. Once you know what the true underlying feeling is, you can address it without food.

You are not alone. There are others who are experiencing exactly what you are! Seek out the support you need to beat binge eating. You don’t need to fly solo.

There’s a community of women ready to welcome you who understand what you are going through. Click HERE to get the support you need.

When Eating is a Non-Issue and Food Decisions Just Happen

When you want to get into a routine and build something new into your life, one way to do so is to schedule and plan. As a chronic dieter, this was (or maybe still is) also true for you when it comes to eating for weight loss (a.k.a. dieting).

You schedule the number of meals you’ll eat that day based on when the plan tells you to, and you restructure your life around that plan. You find that you’re constantly thinking about what you’re supposed to be eating next, will you be eating it “on time” and if you didn’t pack it with you, will you be able to find something comparable. You find the only thing you are thinking about is food.

I want you to remember a time where you weren’t worrying about your weight or your food. You lived your life and when you were hungry you ate, you stopped when you were full and you weren’t frantically wondering if a food fell into your plan if you wanted to have it. For many of you trying to get back to this memory, it might take you all the way back to your childhood days—and that’s OK.

When you were younger and there’s less to worry about, that carefree attitude translated easier to food. Eating was just something you did in between all the other fun things you did each day. And you enjoyed every bite you took.

This is intuitive eating at its finest….when

…..Eating is a Non-Issue and Food Decisions Just Happen

Now that you are older and have been influenced by the diet culture that surrounds you, well, it hasn’t been so easy for you to return to the way you were born.

I know you have this deep desire to become an intuitive eater again. I know this because I have spoken to hundreds of you wishing it were easier. I know how easy it is to fall back into diet mentality, and I also know how important support is for you on this journey.

Free Training

Join me tomorrow, Thursday September 7 at 8 pm EST for a Facebook Live training where I will discuss how you can make intuitive eating second nature again.

I’m going live in my private Facebook group, so if you aren’t yet a member of our group, click here now to join us for free.

Here’s what you’ll learn during our Facebook Live training:

The #1 reason you struggle with implementing the intuitive eating principles
What it really takes to make intuitive eating a part of your being
How you can be at peace with food and yourself so you can enjoy life to the fullest

Oh, and if you are not on Facebook and want to watch the replay, just send me an email to Bonnie@DietFreeRadiantMe.com and I’ll send you the recording.

Food Deprivation Leads to Binge Eating

Overindulging in a food item that you restrict is common if you are a chronic dieter. This is called deprivation backlash-rebound eating.

Here’s a common scenario: you deprive yourself of a certain food, such as your beloved chocolate because you are on a diet and you are not allowed to have chocolate, right? Well an old-time friend comes to visit and brings you a box of chocolates. You put it away vowing you will not open it. A family member spots the chocolate, opens the box and enjoys a piece. Now what do you do?

You think to yourself, “I’m not going to have any, I’m on a diet and I’m doing so well”. You walk away.

A few minutes later, you think to yourself, “Hmmm, I’ll just have one, really only one.” You eat one. It was yummy.

A few minutes later, “I’ll just have one more”. And then…”Oh shucks, I blew it. I might as well finish the box, there are only 4 more. I promise I will start my diet again tomorrow, and I won’t eat chocolate again!”

Sound familiar?

You probably truly believe that you won’t eat chocolate again, or do you? You now feel guilty and as a punishment you skip dinner only to find yourself bingeing into the evening.

The above example is only one example of the backlash that happens when you deprive yourself of a food you love. You rebound by eating, and overeating.

There are many different forms of rebound eating.

Have you ever engaged in The Last Supper eating? I have had many clients tell me that the night before their first appointment with me they ate all the foods that they thought I would tell them they can no longer eat…. the foods that they thought would be off limits. Boy, were they surprised when I didn’t tell them that at all.

Listen, eating shouldn’t be this difficult. It’s time for you to make peace with food so you can once and for all stop the dieting cycle.

Need help? Click here to schedule a time to chat.

Your turn to take action: Tell me about a time that you engaged in rebound eating or The Last Supper. Share your stories in the comments section below.

3 Steps to Stop Emotional Eating NOW

“Why do you eat?”

It seems like a simple enough question. But is it?

This is a question I ask all my clients in our first session. As I am learning about their weight history, diet history, challenges and struggles, I stop and ask them “why do you eat?”

They pause, look at me and say, “that’s a great question”.

There is a myriad of reasons why you eat. Yes, it might be from hunger, true biological hunger. But then again, it may not be. Do you know what true biological hunger feels and sounds like? Probably not if you’ve been a dieter and you’ve been eating based on food rules that have been dictated to you, including when and what to eat.

Stop and think about it. Are there reasons other than hunger that you eat?

Perhaps when you are bored? Lying around the house on a rainy day with nothing to do so you find yourself in the kitchen?

Or maybe you had a disagreement with your partner and you feel sad, hurt or lonely?

You remember the last time you were sad and hurt you ate the double chocolate fudge Haagen Daz ice cream and felt so much better.

Or so you thought…

But then, suddenly you felt worse. You now feel guilty, ashamed and disheartened with yourself. “Why did I do that again?” And, you feel physically uncomfortable, bloated, heavy, sluggish, with acid buildup! Oh, and let’s not forget the original feelings of hurt and sadness which is not multiplied by 100!

How long do you want to ride this emotional eating vicious cycle? It’s not fun. There is a way off, but you have to commit to taking action, because it won’t happen by itself.

Here are 3 steps to get your started:

Identify your emotional eating type and trigger Take a long hard look at your eating habits and discover what type of emotional eater you really are. And, what are your particular triggers that lead you to the cookie jar over and over again!

Create customized strategies to manage your emotional triggers. If you don’t tailor your strategies to your specific triggers, you will constantly jump from one strategy to the next, getting nowhere. In addition to customizing your strategies, it is imperative to learn how to actually feel your feelings, and to be okay with that. This is a tough thing to do, yes it is. But you can do it with the right direction and support!

Use food as your ally. Instead of viewing food as your enemy like most chronic dieters and emotional eaters do, take a step back and realize that the right nutrition can actually help you balance your brain chemicals and regulate your blood sugars to best manage your moods, emotions and stop your cravings.

So, how do you implement these 3 steps and get results?

Join me in Total Food Freedom™, a program to help you end emotional eating and enjoy a new relationship with food. Learn what your emotional eating archetype is, what your emotional eating triggers are, and how to customize and tailor the strategies for each trigger. And, learn how proper nutrition can be your secret weapon to ending emotional eating for good.

Enrollment closes Sunday May 21 at midnight Eastern.

Class starts on Monday May 22nd!

Learn more and register here > www.TotalFoodFreedom.com

How Do I Stop Eating Impulsively?

To someone just hearing about intuitive eating, it sounds glorious, almost too good to be true.

“You mean I can eat all those foods I’ve deprived myself of all those years? And still lose weight? Where has this been all my life?”

So, before I delve too deeply into the topic for today (which I’ll reveal in a moment), let me be sure that I am clear about something very important regarding intuitive eating.

Intuitive eating is not about losing weight. It’s about changing your relationship to food, your mind and your body.

If someone is telling you that they will teach you intuitive eating as a way to lose weight, please run the other way. I’m not saying that some people don’t release excess weight eventually. Some do, some don’t. It’s not the point.

More on this topic here!

Okay, now that I got that out of the way, let’s address today’s topic which is impulsive eating.

The definition of the word impulsive means “actions based on sudden desires or inclinations rather than careful thought; actions based on emotional impulses; acting under stress of emotion.”

When acting impulsively, you are acting quickly or acting without fully examining the consequences.

So for example, when you impulsively grab for the cookie when you walk in from work because it was sitting on the counter, or you impulsively reach for the ice cream in the freezer after you have an argument with your partner. These are examples of when you act without fully examining the consequences. And it’s only after you finish the cookie(s) or the pint of chocolate fudge ice cream that you stop and wonder “why did I do that again?”

Does this resonate with you?

Do you suddenly find yourself eating without having even thought about it first?

Then you feel guilty for “what I have just done…again” and start to criticize yourself for “not wanting it bad enough”?

Impulsive eating can be an emotional roller coaster with triggers at almost every meal that can lead you to overindulge.

And more often than not, there is some emotional reason behind that impulsive decision to eat. It’s just that sometimes it’s not so easy for you to figure it out. But, you have the power within you to identify the WHY behind your impulsive eating. You must first become aware in order to have change.

I’m going to show you how to start this process in my FREE 5-Day Challenge called ‘How to Triumph Over Emotional Eating’. This challenge will help you begin to break your pattern of emotional eating. Together we’ll find YOUR power.

Register for Free HERE!

During the 5 days, you’ll learn my “6 P’s to Success” in changing your relationship to food, so food no longer has power over you. Each day you’ll receive an email with training and a quick assignment to complete. Then later that day we will meet in our Facebook group for a Facebook Live training to dig deeper into that day’s lesson. You’ll also be able to can ask questions and get my personal help.

This challenge will help you triumph over emotional eating and give you the tools you need to succeed.

As a bonus, you will have a chance to win prizes just for participating in the challenge! You will also get access to all 5 videos after the challenge is over.

What are you waiting for? Head over to http://dietfreeradiantme.com/howtotriumphchallenge and sign up today to secure your spot!

Is All Emotional Eating Evil?

This week’s Intuitive Eating Wednesday Question comes from several women in my online community who are struggling with emotional eating.

The question is:

Question:

“Bonnie, when I eat emotionally, I feel guilt. Unless of course if I choose cucumber slices and carrot sticks with hummus. Is it possible to give myself permission to eat emotionally if I really want to without the guilt?

What an amazing question. Perhaps you are wondering this too.

When feeling sad, lonely, unloved, disconnected, frustrated, bored…I could go on and on…what is your first thought? More than likely if you are reading this, your first thought is to seek comfort in food.

Or perhaps, you need more than comfort. You need to escape your reality for a few minutes, you need to numb out just not to feel what you are feeling for even a little while.

And then, more emotions flood in. This time, they are feelings of guilt, shame and despair with promises never to do this again. Until you do.

Let’s be clear about one thing. Food has an emotional connection in your life, in all our lives. It’s actually part of being human. This emotional connection starts as soon as you are born and placed on your mom’s breast to bond. You are fed by your parents, you celebrate milestones with food, such as birthdays, anniversaries and promotions, and almost every culture has food as part of their symbolic customs.

The problem arises when you use food to try to meet too many of your needs, and what happens is those needs don’t actually get met. It then creates an even stronger drive to continue to eat. And that’s when the guilt steps in.

This is most often seen in dieters and those struggling with their weight for many years who have been on and off diets over and over again. There are good foods and bad foods…there’s lots of moral judgement around food that has you making associations of “I’m good” if you don’t eat (“ooh, I deserve a reward), or “I’m bad” if I do eat (I need to be punished).

So you attempt to ‘control’ your emotional eating using willpower, or by restriction, and it works against you each and every time.

As one new client told me – “I thought I could just lose weight and I’ll be fine, but it’s the emotions. My emotions get me every time.”

And how you react to your emotional eating is key to your outcome. Reacting with disgust, that it is “bad”, that you are bad, in essence puts you right back into diet/restriction mode.

It’s time to treat emotional eating from a different perspective. From a perspective of curiosity, kindness and self-compassion. And all of a sudden, the switch flips.

Let’s discuss this further on today’s Facebook LIVE at 5:00 pm EST on my Facebook business page HERE. LIKE the page now so you get notification when I go live. If you can’t make it live, no problem. You can catch the replay.

How to Stop Labeling Food as Good and Bad

This week’s Intuitive Eating Wednesday Question and Struggle comes from 2 women in my Diet Free Radiant Me private Facebook group:

Question:

I know choosing certain foods makes me feel healthy and vibrant. I also know there are certain foods that make me feel the opposite, drain my energy and leave me feeling sluggish. How do I approach health in this way without viewing food as good and bad?

Struggle:

Bonnie, I can’t appreciate the body I have now because it isn’t healthy. I know losing the extra fat will help those issues. But I can’t stop labeling food as healthy or unhealthy. I keep reading not to label foods but we all know broccoli is healthier for you than a Hershey bar. I feel like the extra fat will not go away along with all the health problems until I start feeding myself healthier foods, which feels like a diet. I try to eat mostly healthy but it seems once I eat the unhealthier foods that’s all I crave because they do taste better to me. Help!

Both the question and struggle you have just read above have something in common, which is why I am addressing both in the same blog today on Intuitive Eating Wednesday.

The commonality is…

Food is being labeled. In the first question it’s being classified as “good and bad”, and in the second struggle it’s being labeled “healthy and unhealthy”. This is due to your years of dieting and following rules of foods to eat and those to avoid. The foods to eat are ‘good/healthy for you foods’, meaning they will help you lose weight (or at least not gain weight) and be healthy. The foods to avoid/are unhealthy are ‘bad for you’ foods, meaning they will cause you to gain weight and be unhealthy.

As long as you continue to think of food in these terms, you continue to harbor a diet mindset. And as long as you continue to harbor a diet mindset, you will continue to struggle.

Download Your Fleshing Our Your ‘Good Foods/Bad Foods’ Worksheet here.

Even though intellectually you know you feel more vibrant when you eat food A over food B, if you associate food A as a good/healthy food and food B as a bad/unhealthy food, you will continue to crave food B, depriving yourself of it until you have an emotional trigger and you fall into the “what the heck” mode. You then overeat food B, perhaps even to the point of bingeing, followed by guilt, shame, and hopelessness.

It IS possible to shift your mindset away from labeling foods and out of a dieter’s mindset. However, this must be done without consideration of the nutritional value of the foods otherwise you are still thinking in terms of good/bad, healthy/unhealthy which will keep you stuck in the diet food rule trap.

This is the very reason that I don’t teach nutrition to my intuitive eating clients until Step 5 of my 5 Step Intuitive Eating Program. If we start the process of learning how to nourish your body, yet you have a diet mentality, all the nutrition conversation we have about foods that make you feel healthy and vibrant is heard by you as more diet rules (good/bad, healthy/unhealthy).

Make sense?

Let’s discuss this further on today’s Facebook LIVE at 5:30 pm EST (note the time change!)

In the meantime, grab this freebie to help you understand your good food/bad food mindset: Fleshing Our Your ‘Good Foods/Bad Foods’ Worksheet.

I Feel Full But I Still Want to Eat More

This week’s Intuitive Eating Wednesday Question is:

“How do I stop eating when I know I’m full? I just want to keep eating what’s on my plate until it’s finished. And I do, and then I feel bad, guilty and ashamed that I’ve done it again!”

Do you ever have this conversation in your head?

I hear this question a lot from my clients, which is why I want to address it with you.

As a dieter, you are used to eating on autopilot, and finishing what’s on your plate or in the bag. Part of the journey I take my clients on is learning how to move out of autopilot eating……ahhhh, not always so easy, is it?

If you are eating a meal and you know you are full, but you are just loving the food you are eating and don’t want to stop, it may very well be you testing the intuitive eating process. You just don’t fully believe you could actually give yourself permission to eat what you love. If you did, then you’d know that you can put this food away and have it at another time.

This is often tied to emotions.

Download your Emotional Eating Inventory Worksheet here.

You are feeding an emotional hunger when you continue to eat even after you have recognized you are full. It’s not WHAT you are eating, it’s WHY you are continuing to eat.

So the first step is learning the difference between physical hunger and emotional hunger. This is key. And understanding what emotions you are feeding is the second step that will help you take action to stop.

To break the pattern around emotional eating, you need to increase your awareness around this pattern. You then give yourself the choice to respond differently and to find another way to meet your emotional needs without food.

Grab this freebie to help you take stock of your emotional eating: Emotional Eating Inventory Worksheet.

Another New Weight Loss System that’s Doomed to Fail

Trying to figure out how the picture here connects with the blog title? Read on…

It is not unusual for you to open up a magazine or hear on TV about a new weight loss procedure or miracle diet/supplement to help you lose weight quickly.

If you are a chronic dieter, you probably take notice whenever there is a new “best” way to lose weight. And, you’ve probably tried most if not all of them.

Well, today I had to write about another new weight loss procedure that is about to hit the market because I just can’t believe it. I will describe it to you, without naming names (for good reason).

This latest FDA-approved weight-loss system is minimally invasive. It consists of three tiny capsules, each containing an inflatable balloon attached to a catheter. You would swallow each of the capsules, three weeks apart, and X-rays are taken to ensure they are just in the right spot.

(You would be swallowing inflatable balloons!)

Once the balloons are in the right spot, gas is pumped through the catheter, filling the balloon up. The catheter is removed, and you would go home with a small balloon (or balloons) in your stomach.

The balloons stays there for six months, filling up the stomach. This is meant to help you feel full so you don’t eat as much. After six months, the balloons are removed via minimally-invasive endoscopic surgery.

UGH!

But, why do you need to resort to this type of procedure?

Wouldn’t it be better to learn why you feel the need to overeat, and to change your relationship with food?

The research for this procedure did have the volunteers meeting with a registered dietitian every three weeks, helping them making healthy lifestyle changes, which is good. This system is meant to be done in conjunction with diet and exercise and the company says you would need to meet with a dietitian regularly as part of the program.

But, why not meet with a registered dietitian certified as an intuitive eating counselor to do the deeper work that you have to do NOW so you can finally be free of all these weight loss systems and procedures (which by the way doesn’t keep the weight off long term)?

This is where intuitive eating can be beneficial. If you learn the why behind your eating and what is actually driving your overeating you will no longer seek to fill those needs with food! You will learn how to listen to your body’s hunger and satiety cues and give your body what it wants.

You CAN do this. No device or procedure or pill is needed.

Remember, there is no “quick-fix” to obesity, it is a disease that requires a long-term solution via a multi-faceted approach.

Start by understanding the real reason(s) you overeat, the WHY behind your eating. As I have said many times before, it is not about the food.

If you would like my help to create a healthier relationship with food, your mind and your body, just go to www.TalkWithBonnie.com and we’ll set up a time to chat.

Tag Archive for: emotional eating