Intuitive Eating, 4th Edition

Eating is mostly instinctual. As we grow older, thoughts and feelings often play a part in our decisions about eating. As we often tell our clients, our bodies are not just composed of the tongue and the stomach, but also the mind. We have often heard someone say, I thought that as an intuitive eater, I could eat whatever I wanted. So now I eat whatever I want and as much as I want, whenever I feel like it. This comment actually distorts the premise of intuitive eating. Yes, make peace with food and eat what pleases your palate. Yes, give yourself the freedom to eat unconditionally and eat as much as you need to satisfy your body. But eating whenever you feel like it, without regard to hunger and fullness, might not be a very satisfying experience and might also cause physical discomfort. Attunement with your body's satiety cues is an important part of this process. As an intuitive eater, you will be honoring your brain because it is part of your body. As you go through the principles of intuitive eating, you will be storing information in the memory files that you create and house in your brain. When you feel hungry, you will need to pull up several of these files while deciding what to eat. You will evaluate how hungry you feel and then think about what foods might satisfy your hunger and your taste buds. You might even go through a series of sensual imaginings of the taste and texture and temperature of different foods. You also may open the file to reflect on past eating experiences. You might ask yourself whether your present eating choice has worked out for you when you've eaten it in the past. Did it sustain you long enough? Did it make your blood sugar crash? Did you end up with indigestion? Or did you thoroughly enjoy the food and want to have it again? Your emotions may also come into play when you have the desire to eat. Might you be upset and craving food to comfort and soothe yourself? Or are you bored and thinking about eating as a distraction? Considering these possibilities might inform your decision of what to eat or even whether to eat at all. In the beginning of your journey to reclaim your intuitive eater, you will probably be hyperconscious of hunger, fullness, satisfaction, thoughts, and emotions. Your brain will need to be highly in tune with your tongue and your stomach. As you become more adept at recognizing your inner signals, you may find that your instincts and intuitive wisdom take a more prominent role in your eating experience. Intuitive eating is truly about trusting that you will be able to access all of the information you need by using all aspects of your brain. Your reptilian instincts, your limbic connection with your emotions, and your rational thoughts. Getting back to the roots of this book, it is hard for us to believe that it has been 25 years since Intuitive Eating was originally published. Although the time has flown by rapidly, the years have been packed with profound experiences. We have received innumerable phone calls, emails, social media messages, and letters from people in all parts of the country and around the world. These communications have brought us into the lives of people we could never have known without this book. We have heard stories about how Intuitive Eating has changed lives and healed relationships with food and body. We have talked with people who are in the beginning of their journey and are reaching out to us for more individualized intensive work, whether in person, by telephone, or virtually. We have also received thanks from those who have used the book as a springboard for their own personal healing and have succeeded in the process on their own. We have been asked to refer people to nutrition therapists and other health professionals in other locales who are familiar with Intuitive Eating. In order to spread the word, we have trained more than 1,000 professionals throughout the world to become certified Intuitive Eating counselors and lay facilitators. We have given talks at professional meetings, as well as to students and to the lay public, and have made television appearances and been interviewed on the radio and for podcasts. We have been quoted in articles in newspapers, magazines, and on the Internet. In addition, professional colleagues have asked our permission to use Intuitive Eating as the basis of college lectures, workshops, and seminars of their own. The impact of all of these experiences has been deeply meaningful for us. It has given us the opportunity to broaden the work that we have previously done.