The Intuitive Eating, Health At Every Size and Mindful Eating movements are changing conversations around health and wellbeing for the better.
What is ‘Intuitive Eating’?
Intuitive eating is a psychological therapy that helps people to develop a healthy relationship with their eating, weight, and bodies. One of the major benefits of intuitive eating is better mental health. Unlike traditional diets that restrict certain foods, this eating therapy requires you to stop looking at food as “good” or “bad”, instead, you listen to your body and eat what feels right for you. It focuses on making peace with the food, honouring hunger, satiety, and practising body positivity.
It encourages natural weight loss and helps one find ways to do it. There are no meal plans or restrictive rules, and no weighing of food or people. Intuitive eating is not a diet but a process to restore a healthy relationship between food and the body.
What is Health At Every Size (HAES)?
Health at every size (HAES) is a new peace movement founded by nutritionist Lindo Bacon that helps to promote that all bodies are good bodies. It encourages self-care through addressing health behaviours, acknowledging weight stigma, and being inclusive of human diversity in terms of body size, social status, sexual orientation, and gender identification. It supports people of all sizes in adopting healthy behaviours. HAES follows three basic components: respect, critical awareness, and compassionate self-care.
HAES encourages a focus on health and wellbeing for people of all shapes and sizes, including restoring a healthy relationship with food, listening to your hunger and fullness, managing emotions and distress, and encouraging movement and physical activity for enjoyment and positive benefits it brings, rather than focusing on just weight loss.
Is mindful eating different?
The term Intuitive eating is often used interchangeably with mindful eating, a non-diet or weight-neutral approach to eating and health, or Health At Every Size. Intuitive eating encompasses the principles of mindful eating but extends further to incorporate your instinct, emotion, and rational thoughts about food to help you to move past fear and judgment and it helps you to find satisfaction and peace while eating.
Mindfulness is the capacity to bring full attention and awareness to one’s experience at the moment without judgment. This approach brings mindfulness to choice and the experience of eating. Mindful eating and intuitive eating can be used to reconnect with the body and learn to trust, connect with and respect it again, which ultimately results in breaking the dieting cycle and helps in improving the relationship with the food.
Shaking up traditional ideas
Pop culture is full of diet culture’s influence. Basically, it is a belief system that equates thinness to health and moral superiority. Wellness culture and the wellness diet are just one of many facets of diet culture. Diet culture incorrectly perpetrates the idea that anyone can achieve a thin body by just following a proper diet and doing enough exercise. However, this is completely incorrect. The weight bias stigma is traumatizing and it actually affects people very negatively. Many people are not aware of what and what not to include in their diet. Just to lose weight they tend to neglect important nutrients which can also result in low energy.
Now, social media plays a very important role in influencing people. A lot of people follow celebrities and they also try to follow the diet, irrespective of considering their body type and nutrition requirements. Each person is different from another.
The first step to cancelling diet culture is to increase awareness of what diet culture is. Follow body-positive accounts on social media. Get rid of cheat days and eat the food your body asks for. Making peace with the food is a lifelong process and totally worth it. Rejecting the diet mentality is not easy but imperative. Lastly, pick a mode of exercise that makes you feel good about your body.
It’s all about making yourself feel good rather than pleasing people.
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