The four principles of natural eating are simple because they only require you to listen to your body so you can eat when you are hungry and stop when you are satisfied. What isn’t simple is turning off years of negative self-talk around food, weight and our bodies. There are so many mixed messages, restrictions and weight loss programmes with conflicting ideas that we have often lost the ability to actually trust ourselves and listen to our own instincts.
When you learn to eat naturally one of the key aspects is learning to trust yourself. The first step in doing this is to put food into perspective. Food is not bad or good; and it is not naughty to enjoy your favourite foods. Once you normalise the “treat-type” food it completely takes the pressure off. We can normalise it in a few ways:
Tell ourselves we are “allowed” to eat anything we want when we are hungry. Once we are allowed it, we stop craving it and can make a conscious choice on when we would actually like to eat it. If we are not allowed it, and try to avoid it by willpower, we eventually give in as the cravings get the better of us.
Place it in the cupboard or fridge with all your normal foods, so it is just part of the choices you have available to you. If you hide it or sneak it, it becomes a guilty secret and it is the guilt that leads us to wanting more and overindulging.
Include your “treat-type” food, like chocolate, or chippies on a platter of food, so again it is just part of what you are having. In this way it is not something you are putting up on a pedestal for when you are being “good” and deserve a treat.
Eventually it just becomes normal food. Sure some is healthy and some isn’t and when you learn to trust yourself you will find that you will choose the healthy food most of the time anyway because it makes you feel better, fitter and healthier. The trust comes when you are mindful of how and why you are eating. Once you are tuned into what your body needs it is very easy to trust yourself to make the right choices for you in the moment. Remember the right choice may sometimes be a chocolate bar, but if you are truly listening, you will only need a small portion to satisfy you.
The whole natural eating process is based on listening to what your body truly wants in the moment and sometimes it may not necessarily be food. Once you learn to eat only because you are hungry, it takes the pressure off. This is because if you aren’t hungry you find something else positive to do in the moment instead of eating.
Therefore I encourage you to learn or continue to eat naturally, as it is all positive and empowering, based on trust, listening and respect.