The process of making peace with food may arguably be the scariest part of intuitive eating, even scarier than the process of letting go of dieting all together. Fear of making peace is normal, and expected. You may have a lot of voices in your head telling you this will not work, hasn’t worked in the past, or will cause you to go “wild with your food”. By the time you get to this point in your intuitive eating journey you will have learned to question these voices, and remind yourself how restricting or limiting these foods have not helped you up until now.
When foods are restricted, their gravitational pull is greater. In other words, the foods we restrict are the foods we end up wanting the most. When we restrict a food it also becomes one that takes over our minds, and once we get around that food we have little control. Diet culture has us believing that in order to be healthy we need to tighten the reins and have more control over the food we eat, but the reality is that by loosening the reins our body has the innate ability to eat the amount and types of food that it needs.
Let’s review the process for making peace with food.
Consider Some Things First
- Have you evaluated the reasons dieting and restriction do not work?
- Have you become more aware of your hunger and fullness cues?
- Do you have access to a place you can eat mindfully and without distraction?
- Are you able to recognize any compensatory behaviors that may follow after giving yourself permission?
The Process
- Write a list of your favorite foods, all inclusive!
- Circle the foods that tend to give you pause before ordering them at restaurants, putting them in your grocery cart, or selecting them from your kitchen refrigerator or cupboard. These are foods that you may restrict because of thoughts or beliefs about them.
- Choose one of the circled foods you want to start with. Buy that food and keep it in your house, in a quantity that that is abundant so you do not run out. Be sure to buy the same flavor, as different flavors will make the process take longer (i.e: if you want to start with ice cream, buy just vanilla or cookies and cream, not both).
- When you eat this food, do so mindfully. Fully enjoy the flavors, textures, aromas, and temperature of the food. Check in with yourself to see if it tastes good (do you even like the food?).
- Continue giving yourself permission to eat this food, whenever you want, at home, or out (it’s best to try both). Be sure to restock this food if you need to, so you don’t ever have the sense that you can’t get it again if you want it.
- Once you get to the point where you are sick of this food, or it simply doesn’t sound good anymore, move on to another on the list. This may take days, weeks, or months.
Notice the Changes
- As a fear food is no longer restricted, you may notice it doesn’t call for you anymore, since you know if you want to have it, you can! Remember, restriction of foods makes those foods more enticing, and heightens the reward centers in our brain when we eat them.
- You may start to recognize you don’t even like the food as much as you once thought!
- You will start to realize that, over time, food has become emotionally equal to you.
- You will notice that after testing a couple or a few foods, you have developed even more body trust.
The body trust happens slowly and gradually as you realize that by loosening the reins, your body takes over. When your body takes over, it naturally helps you find more balance in your eating. It soon becomes clear that the more control you have over your eating, the more out of control you are with your eating. Diet culture was wrong, all along.
