3 Keys to Successful Intuitive Eating

Intuitive Eating is a lifestyle of consuming everything in moderation. It does not involve strict calorie counting or following a specific meal plan. It also is not used as a tool to lose or gain weight. It is simply prioritizing a healthy diet throughout a lifetime.

I believe that, as long as your body composition is within a healthy range, this is how God designed for us to eat. It involves filling your day with mostly healthy foods, indulging shamelessly here and there, and keeping control over your emotions so that your body stays within that healthy range across a lifetime. (Proverbs 23:2-3, 25:16, Ecclesiastes 5:18, 1 Cor. 10:31…to name a few…)

**HOWEVER…Intuitive Eating is a skill, and thus has specific components that you need to train so that you can actually do it effectively. I’ve met too many people that love the freedom of just eating a balanced diet, but they are lacking in specific skills, and they don’t get the result they were expecting.

These are the 3 things that I coach my clients on to achieve successful Intuitive Eating.

1. Nutritional Competence - this is the knowledge of how the human body works and the nutrient quality/quantity of the foods you eat. This includes certain practical skills, like eyeballing portion sizes, and balancing heavy and light meals accurately over time.

2. Interoceptive Awareness - this is the capacity to accurately listen to your body cues. It includes practical skills like sensing hunger and fullness cues, and recognizing early signs of dehydration.

3. Self-Regulation - this is the ability to take the information provided from your Nutritional Competence and Interoceptive Awareness and act on it in an appropriate manner. This action needs to be objective, non-emotional, and align with your current goals.

Let’s put this into an example scenario…

Michael is at home at 7pm. He uses his Interoceptive Awareness to realize he’s feeling very hungry. He remembers he already ate 2 other meals earlier in the day, but he uses his Nutritional Competence to realize both meals were quite high in calories, very salty, and full of a lot of simple carbs, like white bread and pasta. He understands that, despite the higher calorie intake, the simple carbs won’t keep him very full, and he might be confusing his hunger with just being thirsty from salty meals. So, instead of making another very large meal to curb his hunger, he uses Self-Regulation to make a meal lower in calories (to balance the earlier meals), higher in protein and fiber (to increase fullness), and drink plenty of water with it (to balance the previous salt intake).

A lack of Nutritional Competence might have caused Michael to misread the hunger signals and have another high calorie meal, thus increasing his body weight over time.

A lack of Interoceptive Awareness might have caused Michael to under-consume water, which isn’t healthy when having a high salt intake.

A lack of Self-Regulation might have caused Michael to not care about the calories and make a frozen pizza for dinner because he was feeling too tired to make something else.

You can see how it’s important to know these skills and leverage them appropriately in order to have successful Intuitive Eating. So focus on improving your Nutritional Competence, Interoceptive Awareness, and Self-Regulation to steward your body well and honor the Lord with your health!

- Michael Zaronas

P.S. If you need help developing these skills, head to the Contact page and we’ll sit down on a call to see where I can help you best!