Intuitive Eating: Where to start?

When trying to find an alternative to dieting, many people come across ideas that are called “intuitive eating”, and that’s great – it’s just a pity that some of these ideas have nothing to do with intuitive eating.

Myth #1: Intuitive eating is chaos and permissiveness

You often hear: “I tried this, bought myself a cake, chips, donuts … I ate what I wanted for two months – I gained 7 kg! Thanks, I don’t want any more.

Intuitive eating really does include any food in your diet, including donuts, but only on the condition that you listen to your own body’s signals of hunger and satiety and do not try to solve your emotional problems with food. Without mastering these basic skills, it’s too early to buy cakes.

Myth #2: It’s a choice between buckwheat and oatmeal for breakfast.

The opposite myth, especially characteristic of “amateur consultants” – people without special education who were able to lose weight, and then decided to share the experience with others for money. For them, the concept of giving up dietary thinking is incomprehensible, and they describe intuitive eating as the ability to choose from a narrow “corridor” of allowed foods, most often low-calorie, low-carb or low-glycemic index foods. Such a diet is no different from a regular diet and does not lead to a solution to problems.

Very often, this diet option is called “conscious” nutrition, which, in concept, is very close to the “consciousness” instilled in us from childhood. Back then, we learned that the ability to do something against our will, showing miracles of violence against ourselves, is somehow good. And now it seems to us that “conscious eating” is conscious. “I won’t take a cake – I’ll take fat-free cottage cheese: who’s done? I’m fine fellow!”

This approach has nothing to do with conscious or intuitive eating. This is another diet trap that has only two equally unpleasant exits: a food breakdown or an obsession with the topic of “proper” nutrition.

Mindfulness is the presence in the present moment, involvement and enjoyment of the process. Unfortunately, diet corporations are promoting a completely different approach.

Myth #3: This is “flexible control”: you can eat anything, but in small portions and keep track of calories

Eat whatever you like, but carbohydrates – only until 12.00. Eat everything, but in portions no larger than a glass and every two hours. Nutritionists are well aware that diets don’t work. But how to solve the problem of weight loss without restrictions?

Increasingly popular is the idea of ​​”flexible control” – individual restrictions disguised as “free food”. Studies show that people who don’t change anything in their diet have a lower body mass index (BMI) over time than those who use flexible control.

What is intuitive eating?

In fact, we are all born intuitive eaters. The baby is anxious, turns its head around looking for breasts and cries until it gets food. He only does this when he’s hungry. A well-fed baby stops eating and does not start until he is hungry.

Children who are allowed to maintain this natural style of eating in the family regulate the amount of energy entering the body on their own. Sometimes they eat a lot, delighting their parents with a good appetite, and sometimes they manage with a very small amount of food.

Grown up children, like babies, are able to regulate the intake of the necessary substances, relying on internal signals of hunger and satiety. You just need to give them the opportunity.

How to Organize Intuitive Eating in Your Family?

1. All foods are equal – all bodies are good

We agree with family members, including children, that we no longer divide food into “bad” and “healthy”, “healthy” and “unhealthy”, into “good” and “bad”. And in exactly the same way we do with our body: we will no longer evaluate ourselves and other people in accordance with their size.

Why? Because it destroys our positive attitude towards our own body and forms in the minds of children the understanding that “fat” is equal to “bad”, as well as “stupid”, “ugly”, “unlucky” and “evil”.

Every child can gain weight from time to time, and just imagine how horrified he will feel because now he will be judged and ridiculed. Most children lose weight imperceptibly and without any effort when they begin to grow up, but getting rid of fatphobia – the fear of becoming “fat” and hostility to the owners of large bodies – is much more difficult.

2. Down with dietary thinking

We believe we can control how our children eat and how their bodies develop. In fact, this is a utopian fantasy. Children have an innate appetite and interest in food. How the child will eat – a lot or a little, with interest or absent-mindedly, whether he will like broccoli or prefer pasta, and what kind of body – large, with a large fat mass, thin, with minimal muscle and fat, or dense and muscular – he form, largely predetermined genetically and microbiologically.

We, parents, can try to influence this by regulating the child’s diet and amount of movement, but the result of our actions will be minimal, and the child may be mentally traumatized.

We don’t know exactly what genetic cards are “dealt” to our children until they are “played out”, which happens in adolescence. All we can do is to give the child a role model of healthy, normal eating.

3. We agree on the shore

Children begin to eat poorly when parents cannot agree among themselves how to feed them. If you decide to turn to intuitive rails, try to enlist the support of your partner. Print him articles about research findings that intuitive eating maintains a lower and more stable BMI throughout life. And most importantly, introduce him to the evidence that children who are forced to diet are more likely to develop eating disorders and gain excess weight in the future.

4. Getting rid of our own “cockroaches”

It is impossible to organize meals without starting with yourself. Read my book Intuitive Eating. How to stop worrying about food and lose weight. Find out for yourself what beliefs about weight and nutrition exist in your head and how it relates to your personal history.

In your family, it was not allowed to leave food on the plate? Was it considered a sin to throw away what was not eaten? Or perhaps you grew up with the belief that you need to limit yourself and that any “delicious” food will definitely prove itself as soon as you step on the scale? Did they force you to eat what you didn’t like, did they teach you to “eat everything”, “not to touch”? These parenting strategies are sure to have an impact on the way you eat and how you feed your children.

5. Making food a shared responsibility

We all, even children, are equally responsible for our nutrition. Hang a shopping list in the kitchen, a pencil on a string, and ask everyone in the family to mark what they wanted to eat during the week, but there were no such products at home. Ask young children what foods they would like to see at home. Stock up on these products without fear that ice cream, croissants and chocolate-covered halvah will definitely be on the list.

6. “Are you hungry?” – first step

For every request for food by the child, ask him if he wants to eat. “Can I have some candy?” – “Do you want to eat?” “When are we going to have dinner?” – “Are you hungry?” “Can I make myself a sandwich?” – “Are you hungry?”

Access to food is possible only with a positive answer to this question. If it seems to you that the child is not hungry, but specifically says that he is hungry in order to get the desired treat, then most likely he is. When transferring children to intuitive eating, there is a period when children “test” whether access to their favorite and desired food will be maintained permanently.

Older children often try to figure out what kind of food we plan to offer them first. “What do we have for dinner?” they ask. And if you tell them that cabbage schnitzels are for dinner, you will suddenly find that they are not at all hungry and very disappointed. However, it should be reported that you were joking and actually pizza for dinner, the same children will turn hungry in no time.

Don’t fall for their tricks. Let the answer to the question “What do we have for dinner?” your question will always be “Are you hungry?”.

7. “What exactly do you want?” – second step

If the answer to the first question is yes, ask the child what exactly he wants. No, you don’t have to stand at the stove all day and cook whatever your kids want. Your responsibility is to find out what their food and taste preferences are at the moment, and if such food is not at home, note that it would be worth buying it.

Children are very flexible creatures, but they always know exactly what they want. True, they do not yet understand how they can discover this knowledge in themselves. Do not make a decision for the child, even if he is confused and cannot understand what he wants. Show him that finding the perfect combination of foods or dishes for his current hunger is a detective game.

“Do you want hot or cold?” – even this simple question greatly narrows the search. “Do you want meat, bread, vegetables or fruits?” “Is there any eggs in this dish?” “Could it be porridge?” “Is it soft, hard, crunchy, runny?”

Children enthusiastically begin to play the food “guessing game” because for them it means that at the moment their parents’ attention is completely theirs. Explain to the children that a positive answer to the question means that they imagined that they had already eaten the chosen dish and experienced the feeling of “coincidence” of the sensations received and the request.

8. “Are you full?” – third step

As soon as a child loses interest in food, gets distracted, takes too long a break, starts playing or chatting with other children – it’s time to figure out what’s going on again. “Are you gorged?” – you ask the child, and this means that you are mentally ready to let him go from the table and give him the opportunity to return to the game, pack the half-eaten food in cling film and put it in the refrigerator.

The same must be done if the child has eaten everything to the end, but continues to remain at the table. Perhaps for the sake of communication, but maybe he has experience when he was already denied a second portion, and he does not dare to ask for more?

It is unacceptable to try to regulate the amount eaten by the child, whether in the direction of increasing or decreasing. Remember: any of your attempts to resort to coercion in relation to what you have eaten in one direction or another will certainly meet with powerful resistance.

9. Legalization of prohibited products

One of the hottest topics is children and sweets. Most children love sweets. For them, this is not just food that gives instant energy, which is very much appreciated by active children. Sweets symbolize summer holidays and free time with friends, holidays, gifts – everything that children love so much!

There are no children who are equally devoted to any sweets, each child has preferences. Find them out. It could be kinder surprises, chips, gummy bears, or hard candy—whatever it is, it’s going to be food you don’t approve of.

Tell your child that from now on, he will be able to decide for himself how much of his favorite goodies he wants to eat and when. Buy as many packages as the child will not eat in 1-2 times – the prohibited product should be in excess. Give your child open access to this product and accept the fact that for several days he will eat only it.

Replenish the stock of the product as soon as it is half exhausted – the child should constantly receive confirmation that the gummy bears will not run out. In the range from a few days to a few weeks, you will see how the child’s interest in this product will fade.

Of course, there will be a new delicacy. Do the same with him. No child in freestyle eating chooses sweets as their main meal. Children choose cheese, chicken, sandwiches, pasta, cucumbers, bananas, soup, zucchini, broccoli and semolina – even in families where parents have the worst childhood memories of these products.

10. Personal shelf

Give each minor family member a personal grocery shelf. It could be a vegetable basket in the fridge, or it could be a drawer in the kitchen drawer. Help your child to purchase his favorite, at the moment, delicacies, without limiting or commenting on his choice. Explain to all family members that this is an “emergency reserve” belonging only to this family member and no one else.

Restock regularly as soon as there are less than half left. Hang a name tag on the shelf if necessary. Such a shelf is the key to a child’s peaceful relationship with sugar-containing foods and the basis for the fact that when he gets out of parental control, he will not overeat sweets every day.

The experience of working with people with obesity, whose childhood fell on the 60-70s in Western Europe, showed that the strategy of categorical restriction of sweets, popular in those years, has very deplorable consequences.

Many of these patients reported experiencing catastrophic weight gain when out of parental control. By that time, being completely independent people in all other areas, in terms of nutrition they remained children, longingly waiting for the right moment to finally reach for sweets and eat them to satiety.

Most of the mistakes in children’s nutrition are based on an unconscious belief that we can teach them to eat one way or another, encouraging them to do so or forbidding them something. In fact, children are born with the ability to satiate and develop immediate, individual food preferences during their first years of life. Our task as parents is to support them, to give them a choice.

Intuitive Eating is a model for making children responsible for how they feed themselves and reducing parental anxiety based on the idea that we can force our children’s bodies—or our own—to be different from what nature intended them to be.