Intuitive eating is about creating a healthy relationship between your food, mind and body and there are many principles of intuitive eating. To make more sense, eating with intuition means to become an expert of your own body. The underlying philosophy behind eating with intuition is that you are born with the inner wisdom to eat intuitively. But this inner wisdom is blinded by the food myths that you believe in and the years of dieting that you have followed. It is not easy to be eating with intuition all the time. Here are 10 principles of intuitive eating that will guide you.

1) Accept your genetic blueprint and the fact that this is how you are built and stop feeling envious about how thin your best friend looks. Respecting your body is the key. If you are critical about the way you look it would get difficult to free your mind of diet mentality and the unrealistic weight loss goals that you’ve set for yourself.

2) Of the many principles of intuitive eating, listen to this carefully. Kill the diet-freak in you. No diet is good for the body. Why control your food cravings and be an unhappy person? Throw out all diet books that give you false hopes of what you can achieve. The diet mentality is the biggest enemy of intuitive eating.

3) Remember, you are not ‘bad’ if you’ve had a piece of chocolate or ‘good’ if you skipped dinner. If you do not erase these thoughts from your psyche, it would be impossible to listen to your inner wisdom.

4) Stop your fight against food. No food is bad. The more you control your cravings for a particular food, the more are the chances that the cravings go out of hand and you end up binging.

5) Hunger is a natural body response to its need for energy. Honor it with energy-inducing carbohydrates. Keep your body biologically fed if not it can trigger the drive to overeat.

6) Always be comfortably full. Listen to your hunger pangs and feed your body. Stop when you feel full, but not stuffed. Enjoy everything that you eat.

7) Among many principles of intuitive eating, one of the important one is to solve your emotional problems without reaching out to food for comfort. Each feeling and emotion that you experience has its own trigger and unique ways to appease it. Remember, food is not one.

8) Respect your health. A sound mind resides in a sound body. Don’t deprive your body of food. That would be inviting health troubles. You will not gain weight from one snack, one meal, or one day of eating. It's what you eat consistently over time that matters.

9) Rather than overemphasising on being waif-thin, enjoy the whole experience of eating. When you eat what you want in a perfect environment, it automatically presses the happiness button in you. If you give your body the privilege to experience this happiness, you will realise it takes much less food to actually make you happy.

10) Finally, exercise. Not exercise with weight loss in mind. Exercise for the pure pleasure of it.

Image Credit: theintuitiveworld.com

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