Intuitive Eating Principle: Feel your Fullness
Conscious Eating Guide
Value and enjoy the eating experience when possible
A good relationship with food starts by respecting your fullness, rather than seasonally changing your diet. Respect your fullness is the ability to stop eating because you have had enough to eat biologically. Sounds easy, right? So why can we eat an entire box of cookies regardless of how hungry or full we are?
Some factors that have conditioned us to finish a complete plate, or empty a box of cookies regardless of how hungry we feel can be guilt, hunger, and emotions. We learned to ignore our satiety cues and replace them with:
GUILT: Parents taught us to finish everything on our plate. So we learned to keep eating until we finish the plate, ignoring our internal satiety cues.
HUNGER: When we start a meal in an overly ravenous state, an effortless state to bypass the normal satiety state, we tend to eat too fast without savoring the food, eat more, and find less satisfaction.
EMOTION: When we use food to cope with a feeling. happy, sad, tired, stressed
Breaking the above habits will take time, be patient and kind to yourself. Focus on paying more attention when you eat and learn to recognize comfortable satiety. The sensation is highly individual meaning you really need to slow down and create conscious awareness eating to realize to feel it.
While you are creating awareness pay attention to the factors that can affect your fullness such:
Learn to say NO. Defend yourself from obligatory eating.
Eating Every 3-4 hours. micronutrients, protein, carbohydrates, and fat influence your fullness.
Eating with other people. Observe if you eat more with some friends and restrict yourself with others.
Discovering your fullness level will help you identify your last few bites; your threshold. Eventually knowing the last bite of food, acknowledging it, enjoying it, and stopping eating.
