Eating when we’re hungry isn’t what causes weight gain. We gain weight when our body has no need for food, but we eat anyway. Every body has a natural weight & to reach it, we must eat when we feel physically hungry & stop when our body had enough.
What does ENOUGH mean?
What I noticed in my rollercoaster relationship with food until I healed it is that we take more than enough food because we consciously or subconsciously believe we’ll never get enough of what we really want in life: things like, love, worth, happiness, relationships, passion, understanding. So, we compensate.
When I started eating to satisfy PHYSICAL hunger, I realized that having enough meant listening to my body’s signals & not using food as a mechanism to feed my mind or areas of my life that were lacking.
I now know that being full & having enough don’t always go hand in hand. We can have enough without being stuffed & that’s why it’s important to eat slowly & allow the feeling of satisfaction to register.
More importantly, we can NEVER get enough of what we don’t actually want. If what you truly want is acknowledgement from a spouse or from your boss, no food in the world will satisfy you, in the same way that if you want Fuzzy Peaches & you eat a peach instead, you’ll still want & even binge on gummies.
True satisfaction is achieved when the mind & body are engaged & work synergistically. When I stopped using food to feed the hungers & sadness of my heart, I saw the pleasure of eating exactly what my body wanted & began to focus on parts of my life I never noticed because all I thought about was how I’d starve myself or compensate or what I’d binge on. That’s how I said goodbye to restriction & binging.
This is what intuitive eating means to me!
