Nutrition is a Thing
from food rules to freedom • LOVE • Intuitive Eating Principles #2, 3, 4
From food rules to freedom…it begins with LOVE
A few years back when I thought I needed a business plan and brand strategy before I could go public with any of my thoughts about building a positive food relationship, the phrase “food freedom” popped in my head. That’s it! I thought. But when I Googled for potential trademark conflict, guess what I found…the Whole30 diet! Complete with food plans, good/bad food moralizing, and “just the right amount of signature tough love.”
At that point in my life (about 8 years ago), I knew one thing for certain: love is an essential ingredient for a better relationship with food. Not tough love, but you’re-enough-just-as-you-are love.
Receiving that Good, True, and Beautiful Love was one thing, but learning how to give it to myself was another. Back then, my single desire was to learn to trust my body instead of obsessively following external food rules. If my actions weren’t “kind and loving” I stopped to evaluate what was going on, how I was feeling. This led me to feel and deal with anxiety, my inability to say no to others’ demands, and my go-go-go drive that often left me frazzled and exhausted.
Fixing our food relationship is challenging work because it’s not really about the food, it’s about how we live our lives. By allowing food to be the pleasure its meant to be in life and by building connection to our bodies instead of controlling them to death, we begin to live into a place of peace and ease and freedom.
Intuitive Eating Principes #2, 3, 4: Honor Your Hunger, Make Peace with Food, Challenge the Food Police
Remember Principle #1, from my post last week, Reject the Diet Mentality? It isn’t that easy. Several of the principles of Intuitive Eating (IE) dig into this concept from different angles, like #4, Challenge the Food Police.
Picture all the food rules you’ve ever followed. I see a giant Venn Diagram with very little left in the intersecting middle. Quinoa? Celery? How depressing is that?
The “food police” want to enforce all the food rules, for me: Weight Watchers’ points and exchanges, Montignac’s low glycemic choices and whatever you do, don’t eat cheese with bread or crackers!, Jay Robb’s alternating days of low glycemic/high-glycemic eating to manage those glycogen stores. Do it or you’ll get fat.
It’s hard to stop all this from swirling in your brain, but it’s possible. Working towards neutralizing all foods is part of the process. This is covered under the IE Principle #3, Make Peace with Food. Any time you’re tempted to label food as “good/bad” stop and think. Usually those labels are rooted in diet culture/diet mentality and if you want peace with food, you need to stop it.
Taste it. Savor it. Do you like it? How does it make you feel?
Whatever you choose to eat, taste it, savor it, and notice: Do you like it? How does it make you feel? During the eating but also afterwards.
As I’ve mentioned in prior essays, when foods are forbidden, they remain enticing and have power over you. Two of my current “fun foods” are Boulder potato chips and Justin’s dark chocolate peanut butter candies. I ate three packs of those candies last week, probably more than I needed, but they tasted great and were a comfort during a stressful time. I haven’t felt great in my body the last few days, but looking back, I did eat quite a lot of rich food last week—enchiladas, chicken pot pie, pizza night, beef Bourguignon, tuna salad with those potato chips for lunch a couple days, and fewer than usual vegetable-focused meals. My instinct (diet mentality! food police!) is to blame it on the candies and tell myself, See! Sugar is bad!
I know IE works, I’m a facilitator of the method. But I do have a history of dieting—30 years worth—so, it goes deep and I need to be vigilant and use the tools I have. So instead of banning the candies and chips (or enchiladas, or pizza), I’m noticing how I feel, which is, not the best. To feel better, I plan to practice IE with more awareness today, starting with IE Principle #2, Honor Your Hunger. When I’m hungry, I will choose what I want to eat based on what’s available, what I feel like eating, and how I want to feel. I think lunch will be the Soba salad I made yesterday with lots of red cabbage and cilantro. I wish I had some chicken to go with it, but I don’t. And that’s okay.
Nutrition is a Thing
Uninformed people criticize Intuitive Eating as somehow being oblivious to nutrition but nothing could be further than the truth. IE was developed by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, two nutritionists who witnessed tremendous suffering in their Los Angeles client base—food obsession, compulsive dieting, eating disorders of all kinds, self-loathing, and despair. A negative relationship with food is first and foremost a mental health issue. Their 10 Principles were designed to first restore a person’s trust in their body and their peace of mind; nutrition comes later and gets established on a firm foundation that will never crumble.
When I learned Intuitive Eating in 2019, I began to eat more nutritiously long before I got to the last principle, #10 Honor Your Health with Gentle Nutrition, because I noticed how nutritious foods made me feel—good! I wasn’t eating vegetables because they were low in points or calories or high in fiber or because I couldn’t eat anything else. I ate what I wanted, I was satisfied, and vegetables were part of it. I knew that colorful fruits and vegetables were good for my body, I prepared them in great tasting ways (because that’s my thing, I’m a cook), and because after I ate them, I felt good. That’s positive nutrition! Choosing foods because they help you feel good!
Smooth Sailing, Fix Your Food Relationship in 2025!
So this is week 5 of what I’m calling Smooth Sailing, how to fix your food relationship in 2025. Thank you so much for being here. I’ll keep posting every Monday. Please subscribe and share.
Here’s a recap of January:
About Love & Cookies, homepage
Week 1: Food Addict? Or Something Else?
Week 3: Sugar “Addiction” and Primal Eating
Week 4: One is Never Enough…because None are Allowed
That’s all for now. Hope you have a great week!
