Intuitive Eating…Putting your {Mind} where your {Mouth} is

Click here to sign up for Carson Tahoe’s next Intuitive Eating series, starting April 14!

With the term “mindfulness” being such a buzzword in our busy lives today, many of us may not know the powerful effect this can also have on our eating habits. Mindful, or, “intuitive” eating, rewrites our past beliefs about how, when, and what we eat. So, instead of depriving ourselves through stressful forms of dieting, the way we eat should be honored and savored, with each and every pleasurable bite.

Carson Tahoe’s Intuitive Eating series is designed to help people discover why they eat when they’re not hungry and how to be more in control of what, when, and how they eat. Research shows that upon completing the program, people are more mindful, they eat based on physical instead of emotional cues, they appreciate their bodies more, and they binge less often.

With Intuitive Eating, you can free yourself from chronic dieting and constantly weighing yourself, while creating a healthy relationship with food, mind and body.

Here are some of the most common Intuitive Eating myths that we’d like to take the opportunity to clarify:

If I eat intuitively, I’m afraid that I will get fat.

Intuitive eating is eating that is based on physical signs of hunger, not eating that is based on emotional cues (like boredom, anxiety, or stress) or environmental cues (like food sitting around in the break room, advertising, or yummy food smells). As a general rule you would eat when you are physically hungry (“body hunger”). This type of eating would rarely lead you to overeat.  Eating intuitively will lead you to fulfilling physical hunger with food that helps the body feel healthier, not exhausted.

How can I eat whatever I want and not gain weight?

What does “eating whatever I want” mean?  What it implies is that, given the option, you would eat cakes, cookies, chocolates, chips, and all the fried food you want all day every day.  When exploring this idea further, people say that when they overeat high sugar, fat, salt foods they feel absolutely awful and when they eat healthier food they actually feel really good. The next question becomes, “Why would you want to eat in a way that make you feel absolutely awful?”  Is that really what you want to eat or is it just because you have denied yourself pleasure with food for so long that you think, given the opportunity, you will never quit eating.  That is a different issue. Learning to eat all kinds of food in appropriate amounts for the body is what happens when you mindfully, intuitively eat.  You can have cake, but you are quite unlikely to want the whole thing.  Actually, eaten mindfully, often a few bites are enough.

If you have not been paying attention to your body for a long time, trusting it will take time.  Carson Tahoe’s Intuitive Eating program can help. And, as you move from eating based on messages from your head and emotions to eating based on messages from your belly, you will be guided to the weight your body wants to be and to the health that you want to feel.

Click here to sign up for Carson Tahoe’s next Intuitive Eating Series, beginning on April 14, 2016. The cost is just $20. Hope to see you there!